Corvus stayed under the cloak and let the cavern teach him what it was.
It was not a tomb.
It was a headquarters that refused to die.
Heat rose from the pit, thick enough to make the stone sweat. The runes in the walls pulled at the mana around them with steady pressure, keeping the cavern still against time. Every hieroglyph line was a command in stone.
He hovered above a street and watched the town move.
Ten feet was the baseline here.
The jackal-headed beings walked like wardens, long limbed and narrow waisted, shoulders wrapped in dark linen and leather that had been oiled until it looked almost wet in torchlight. Their muzzles were longer than a dog's, closer to a desert predator. The ears stood tall and rigid, twitching when voices rose nearby.
The cat-headed ones moved with less weight and more precision. Gold bands sat at wrists and biceps, engraved with symbols that matched the runes in the walls. Their eyes were slitted, unblinking, always scanning. They looked like guards dressed as priests.
Falcon-headed creatures watched from higher ground. They stood on rooftops with their long beaks angled toward the streets, heads tilting in small, sharp movements. Their robes carried air within the folds as if the cloth itself preferred to stay light.
A lioness-headed pair crossed an intersection without yielding. Everyone else shifted aside. Their bodies were built like soldiers, heavy through the chest and shoulders, the kind of strength that made stone feel negotiable. The jewellery on them looked ceremonial. The posture looked like a command.
Near the ritual chambers, ram-headed figures moved in slow lines, hands stained with clay and dark resin, fingers thick as if they were meant to shape more than pottery. Their horns curved wide and polished by touch.
Between all of them, the mummified labour moved with silent routine. Linen wrapped tightly. Feet dragging faintly on stone. They carried trays, stacked bones, cleaned stains, and never spoke.
Speech belonged to the living.
The language carried across the streets in a sound that was sharp and old. Consonants clipped like stone striking stone. Corvus understood it. Not perfectly at first, a simple Memory Mapping solved that. Ancient Egyptian sat in his mind like a tool he had always owned.
A jackal-headed warden barked a line toward a pair of mummies that had stopped too close to a ritual chamber.
"Move."
The meaning came clear even if the words stayed foreign. The mummies moved.
Corvus let his curiosity settle into calculation.
These were not gods. These were their servants, priests.
He had expected traces of elder work. He had not expected the elders to have made a civilisation of servants, then left it behind as a living wound. They had modified humans and combined them with chosen symbols, then used the result as their hands and mouths in the region.
When the elders left, they left the servants. These creatures were stuck in a never-ending loop. Doing what they did aeons ago, as this was the only thing they were created for. When humanity started to hunt them, they went underground.
Literally.
He drifted toward the magma pit again and watched the jackal-headed cleaner work. It moved without haste, shovel scraping over stone, pushing flesh and bone into molten rock as if it were disposing of rubbish.
The smell should have been unbearable.
Bubble Head Charm kept it distant, but he could still sense it through the edges. Blood, burnt fat and countless deaths.
He approached from behind, silent, cloak hiding the outline of his body. The creature did not look up.
Corvus activated Replication.
Magic reached.
It hooked into the being's nature like a needle slipping into skin. The response came immediately. A flood of information pressed against his mind, ordered and brutal.
Immortality.
Necromancy.
Dimensional Shift.
Super Senses.
Sacred Blood.
Telekinesis
Extreme Strength.
Extreme Durability.
Corvus's eyes narrowed behind the cloak.
Immortality and Necromancy made sense. A jackal priest cleaning corpses beside magma was not subtle.
Dimensional Shift made him pause.
He watched the creature again, watched how it moved around the edge of the pit with confidence that suggested it knew where it stood in more than one world.
Anubis.
Guide of souls. Keeper of dead roads. If the elder had shaped his servants to do his work, then a shift between spaces would be a tool, not a luxury.
Corvus's thoughts moved to Osiris.
The memory of Egypt in Muggle books showed a mummified god, green or black-skinned, death and preservation wrapped together like a neat lie. Green skin depicts vegetation and the Nile's cycles of growth. Black skin, on the other hand, is decay and death. Corvus did not have the patience to check every dark-skinned person on the planet for elder residue. He also doubted Osiris would be that obvious.
He pushed the question aside. He did not need to solve the pantheon today. He needed to strip it. He moved away from the pit back into the streets.
The cloak kept him unseen. Phase Flight remained active.
A pair of falcon-headed sentries stood at a corner where the central avenue widened. Their heads turned in small, constant movements as they watched the town.
One spoke, voice carrying authority without shouting.
"Keep the line. The cages fill again."
The other answered with a short phrase that carried agreement and complaint together.
Corvus hovered close enough to feel the gust of air when one of them shifted its wings under the robe. The movement was not decorative. The cloth hid the structure.
He activated Replication and checked them both.
The trait set hit with a familiar pattern.
Immortality.
Sacred Blood.
Air Manipulation.
Light Manipulation.
Clairvoyance.
Farsight.
Telekinesis
Extreme Strength.
Extreme Durability.
His gaze was fixed on the forehead of the nearer one.
A disc sat there, gold and bright, shaped like a sun pressed into metal. It was not a crown. It was a marker.
Ra.
The other had no disc. Its eyes looked sharper, more predatory in attention than in violence.
Horus.
Muggles had mixed them in later myths because Muggles mixed everything they did not understand. Corvus did not care about the myths; his prize was in front of him.
Air and Light were separate levers. Clairvoyance and Farsight tasted like a surveillance empire.
He moved on before curiosity became delay.
Near a building that looked like an archive, ibis-headed figures crossed the street in a group of three. Their heads were longer, curved beaks dipping as they spoke. Their robes carried ink stains and wax. Their hands held tablets and scrolls, and their pace was brisk in the way of men used to being obeyed.
One of them snapped a sentence that sounded like a reprimand.
Corvus let the language settle fully in his mind and activated Replication.
Immortality.
Supreme Intellect.
Spellcraft.
Languages.
Chronomancy.
Sacred Blood.
Telekinesis
Extreme Strength.
Extreme Durability.
His throat tightened. Spellcraft and Chronomancy.
Mouth-watering did not even cover it. He had tasted elder work through the Nereids' water Manpulation. This smelled like the same class of superiority, not a wizard's learned spell but a built-in authority.
Thoth, her domains were Writing, Wisdom and Judgement of the dead.
Egypt's pantheon had been obsessed with death, and the servants reflected it.
He drifted toward a wider plaza where lioness-headed and cat-headed creatures moved in overlapping patrol lines. The lioness-headed ones wore heavier armour. The cats wore lighter gear, more ornamental, more flexible.
A lioness-headed priest spoke to a cat-headed one, and the tone was not friendly.
"You let a prisoner speak out of turn again, I will remove your tongue myself."
The cat-headed one lowered its head, ears flattening for a moment. "Yes, Lady."
Sekhmet and Bastet.
Corvus activated Replication.
The return was interesting. Immortality, Telekinesis, Strength and Durability were standard on all of them. set.
The other traits landed like a fist.
Physical Dominance.
Destructive Dominance.
Regeneration and Healing.
Extreme Agility.
Heightened Instincts.
Biological Manipulation.
He understood the split without needing explanation. Sekhmet carried ruin and healing in the same hand. Bastet carried protection and speed.
Corvus moved through the town in a slow arc and inspected the rest.
Crocodile-headed servants of Sobek held water and plant manipulation, their bodies thicker through the torso, their mouths lined with blunt teeth that looked made for crushing.
Ram-headed priests of Khnum carried biological and life manipulation, hands always busy, shaping something, carving something, fixing something.
Seth's servants held chaos magic, lightning, weather and earth manipulation, their presence rougher, less disciplined, as if their creator had given them violence and laughed when it bled into temperament.
Wolf-headed patrols of Wepwawet moved at the edges, the openers of ways, and their trait set caught Corvus's attention hard.
Dimensional Scout.
The words sat in his mind like a door handle. The most possible explanation of where the Elders come from and where they went was this trait.
He hovered above a street and listened.
A group of priests argued in the old tongue near a ritual chamber.
"The next sacrifice comes at dusk."
"The cages are full. The circles are hungry."
"Keep the wards tight. The surface slaves are slacking again."
The last line made Corvus pause.
He looked up at the ceiling and the runes that held it.
What and who was their connection to the surface?
A ram-headed priest led two jackal wardens and an Ibis-headed one down a side corridor cut into the cavern wall. The passage smelled of wet clay and sharp resin. The walls were carved with hieroglyphs in tight bands, some painted with dark pigment that still looked fresh.
Corvus drifted after them under the cloak and kept to the ceiling where torchlight died.
The corridor opened into a chamber that looked like a workshop pretending to be a shrine.
A stone wheel stood at the centre, waist high and wide enough for a man to lie across it. Its rim was carved with spirals and small animal forms. A shallow channel ran from the wheel to a drain that disappeared into the rock. The floor around it was stained and scrubbed, stained and scrubbed again.
Three braziers burned in corners, their flames steady and blue white. The heat in the room sat heavy and damp. The air carried the taste of salt and iron.
A cage stood against the far wall. A man inside gripped the bars with both hands. His clothes were modern, torn at the knees, shoes ruined by sand and fear. His eyes tracked the wardens. He was from Libya, captured and transferred.
The jackal-headed wardens spoke in the old tongue, short phrases that sounded like routine.
"Pull him."
"No noise."
The captive resisted for a breath, then a jackal warden placed a hand on his throat with casual strength. The man's struggle stopped when the grip tightened by a fraction. They dragged him to the stone wheel and forced him down. The other warden drew blood from the victim with a dagger. He poured the blood into a small bowl from the shelf.
The ram-headed priest stepped close.
It stood over ten feet and moved with a craftsman's calm. The horns curved wide, polished like bone that had never known decay. Its hands were large and stained to the wrists, fingertips dark with dried blood. Hygiene was not one of the main concerns here.
The priest took a small bowl from a shelf. Inside, pale paste clung to the sides, clay mixed with blood that caught torchlight like ground glass. It dipped two fingers into the bowl and drew a line down the captive's sternum.
The man jerked. His breath hitched when the paste touched skin.
The ram-headed priest placed one palm on the man's chest and pressed.
The skin did not yield.
It changed.
The man's ribs rose under the priest's hand as if the bone was being pushed into a new shape. His mouth opened for a scream, then the sound died in his throat. A jackal warden leaned down and spoke into his ear, voice low and sharp.
"Silence. Your suffering is meaningless. From this point on, you exist only to serve, and in that service, you are exalted."
The captive's eyes watered. His fingers clawed at the stone wheel. His nail breaking, leaving bloody trails. Someone needs to introduce sedatives to these creatures.
The priest traced hieroglyphs across his collarbone with the same two fingers, slow and exact. Each sign sat on the skin for a heartbeat, then sank beneath it as if the flesh had learned to read.
Corvus watched with hard focus. This was not Transfiguration. This was construction on the very basic levels of Life Manipulation.
The captive's spine arched. Muscles tightened along his back, then thickened. His shoulders widened by inches in a single breath. The sound of it was wrong, a deep shifting crack that belonged to stone, not a living body.
The priest lifted its hand, and the man's head followed, pulled by invisible pressure. The jaw lengthened. Teeth pushed forward. The nose collapsed into a muzzle.
A snout formed. Not a human and definitely not an animal. A chosen symbol pressed into flesh. The ram-headed priest changed the bowl, this one filled with dark liquid that smelled like sap and ash. It poured a thread of it over the man's brow and drew a circle.
The circle split into lines. Lines turned into a carved pattern.
A mark of office.
The captive's eyes rolled back, then snapped forward again, darker now, pupils narrowing as if the world had shifted into a different spectrum.
His hands spasmed, fingers elongated, broken nails grew and thickened. The skin on his forearms tightened, then hardened in patches like armour growing in place.
The jackal wardens held him down as his torso changed shape. Breath left him in short bursts, each one sounding less like a man and more like a creature learning to inhale.
The ram-headed priest finally spoke.
The old tongue came out slow, ceremonial, like a verdict.
"You are ascended. You serve the gods now." He stepped away from the reshaped human.
"Be honoured in your shape, sanctified in your service, exalted in your role. Your flesh is the vessel, your spirit the flame, your obedience the crown. Through silence you are purified, through service you are eternal."
The Ibis-Headed creature was working while the Ram-headed one was talking. It was transferring and organising memories and knowledge.
"Rise, chosen one. The gods have claimed you, and in their will you endure."
The transformation finished with a final shift. The former captive's eyes stopped pleading.
A blankness slid into place, smooth and obedient. The new creature lay on the wheel, breathing hard, chest rising under linen that a jackal warden wrapped around it with practised speed.
The ram-headed priest stepped back and inspected the result the way a potter inspected a fired piece.
Corvus did not blink; he did not move. Memory Mapping showed the ritual has nothing to do with the blood, the bowls or the symbols. The Ram-headed priest was repeating a tradition over the aeons.
He let Replication brush the edge of the former captive to see the results of the manipulation. It was not a human anymore. It was one of the servants of Anubis. Mind and body. He did not use soul magic to see if it had evolved as well. Not yet.
He was going to map every one of these creatures' memories. There was a possibility of finding more settlements or even more through their surface connections.
He drifted back toward the cages.
Muggles stared at shadows and torchlight, eyes hollow. One woman pressed her hands against the bars and mouthed words he could not hear through charm and distance.
A child sat in the corner and did not cry. The boy had already learned that crying was wasted breath.
He turned away and sank into a dark alcove between two columns. Phase let him slip into stone until he was half inside it, hidden, watching through a crack that would not exist for anyone else.
Memory Mapping activated.
He reached for the nearest mind, then the next, then the next, collecting language, ritual structure, command chains. He started his replication as well. This was going to take months and was going to be worth every single second of it.
He watched a ram-headed priest trace a glyph and hungered for the life manipulation in his bones.
He watched a wolf-headed scout pause, head turning as if it heard something in another space.
Corvus held still and let Replication touch the edge of that trait.
Dimensional Scout.
He kept his breathing controlled. He was not going to let even one skill pass him. Outside, the town continued to function. Braziers burned, and Ritual chambers filled and emptied again and again.
A jackal-headed cleaner pushed another body into magma like it was a daily chore.