The dragging stone sound had stopped.
Leo stood in the archway, his empty sockets fixed on the darkness beyond. The noise hadn't been footsteps. It had been a single, heavy scrape. Then silence.
It could be waiting.
His new instincts—a cocktail of his own fear and the rat's skulking impulses—screamed at him to hide. His human mind, struggling for control, insisted on knowing.
He edged forward, each step a careful placement of bone on stone to minimize the click-clack. The corridor beyond was short, ending in another collapsed section. A large, flat piece of carved ceiling slab had slumped from the wall, its edge dragged across the floor before coming to rest. The scrape-mark was fresh in the dust.
A false alarm. Just settling ruins.
The relief was a cold, quiet thing. No new monster. But the tension didn't leave him. It settled deeper. This place was a trap, and he was the mouse in its walls. He couldn't stay in the entrance chamber. He needed to understand his prison.
He retreated and took stock. His body. It was a tool, and a fragile one. He flexed his fingers, made a fist. The bones clacked softly. He tried to run in place. The motion was jerky, unbalanced. He had no tendons to store energy, no muscles to fire smoothly. He was a puppet with only one string: his will.
He thought of the skill he'd stolen. Gnawing Bite.
Focusing on the concept, he willed it to activate. His jawbone unhinged with a sickening, dry CLICK, dropping open wider than any human mouth could. A phantom sensation of sharp teeth and a desperate need to sink them into something flooded him. He snapped his jaw shut, rattling his own teeth.
The skill was there. But using it felt like wearing a dead thing's skin.
The rat's instincts provided one small benefit: a heightened sense for shadow and cover. Moving towards the opposite corridor from the false alarm, he found himself naturally leaning into the darker patches, his movements becoming a series of short, quiet shifts. It was unnerving, but useful.
The next corridor sloped gently downwards. The air grew colder, damper. The pervasive gray of his vision deepened. After twenty tense meters, it opened into a larger, circular chamber.
And there, he found the dead.
Three bodies lay in a rough circle, bathed in a shaft of pale light from a crack in the high ceiling. The scene was a frozen moment of violence.
To the left, a man in stained leather armor was splayed on his stomach, a simple dagger buried to the hilt between his shoulder blades. Betrayal or a strike from behind.
In the center, a woman in blue robes lay torn apart. Great gashes from some huge claw had ripped through fabric and flesh alike. Her face was locked in a final scream.
To the right, a man in polished, silver-chased mail lay on his back. A heavy mace rested near his hand. His neck was bent at an impossible angle. A silver holy symbol of a rising sun lay on his chest, now dim and tarnished.
They were fresh. Days old at most. The coppery scent of old blood was a faint, cold note in the air, perceived not by smell but by some soul-deep awareness of spilled life.
Leo felt no pity. No horror at the human carnage. The connection was severed. He saw only what they were now: objects. Resources.
But the idea… the idea of consuming them…
His human ghost recoiled. They were people. They had lives, names.
The hunger in his core pulsed, a deep, resonant thrum. It felt the dense, lingering soul-energy coiled within the corpses. It was richer, brighter, and infinitely more tempting than the rats' scant power. It was a feast laid out before a starving thing.
He stood at the edge of the chamber for a full minute, a war waged in silence.
The logical voice, cold and clear, won. You are not human. You are a monster in a monster's world. You need their strength to live. To understand. Sentiment is a luxury for the living.
He approached the robed woman first. Her death had been violent, her energy likely turbulent. He knelt beside her, the bones of his knees popping. His skeletal hand hovered over her still chest.
Revulsion was a hollow ache. The hunger was a sharp, pulling void.
"I need to understand," he whispered, the sound a dry rasp of air through a rigid throat. "I need to survive."
He let the hunger rise. He focused his will, not on taking, but on seeing. On knowing.
"Ahamkara."
The black tendril, thicker and more insistent than before, erupted from his center. It plunged into the woman's corpse.
The influx was not a stream. It was a torrent.
[Soul Energy +150]
[Skill Acquired: Mana Sense (Extra)]
The numbers were nothing. The sensation was everything.
A hurricane of Echoes blasted into him.
The scent of parchment and specific incense—lavender and something sharp.
The feel of coarse monk's wool under her fingers.
A flash of a smiling man's face—her brother—before he left for a northern crusade.
The searing, blinding pain of holy magic—her own—reaching for a wound and being violently repelled by a deeper, corrupting energy.
The taste of blood in her mouth.
A desperate, fervent prayer, a silent scream inside her skull: "Dawn Father, spare your servant! The corruption is too deep! It burns!"
Leo staggered back, collapsing onto his backside. His bones clattered against the stone. Inside his skull, it felt like glass shards were swirling in a storm. The woman's final moments, her fear, her faith, her failure—they weren't memories he watched. They were experiences he relived for a fractured, eternal second.
He clutched his skull, willing the chaos to stop. The foreign emotions—devout terror, sisterly love, agonizing pain—washed over his own barren emotional landscape, leaving scorch marks. It took long, slow minutes for the storm to subside, for the Echoes to settle into the background noise of his being, faint but permanent.
He was shaking. Not with fear, but with violation.
But he was also… more. The energy that had come with the storm was substantial. He felt it coiling within his bones, a palpable reserve of cold power. His senses felt sharper. And there was a new layer to his perception—a faint, shimmering awareness of the energies in the room.
Mana Sense.
Gritting his will, he pushed himself up. The world was the same, yet different. The chamber was now stained with lingering hues of violent red (death, pain) and a sickly, decaying purple (the dungeon's corrupt aura). The bodies glowed with faint, fading white embers—their residual soul-light.
He had crossed a line. He felt soiled. But he also felt, for the first time, a sliver of potential strength.
Pragmatism demanded he finish the task. He moved to the leather-clad scout, bracing for another Echo. The tendril speared him.
[Soul Energy +85]
[Skill Acquired: Dagger Proficiency (Normal)]
This Echo was simpler, sharper: the thrill of the hunt, the tension of moving unseen, a sudden, shocking betrayal—a familiar face in the dark, then piercing cold in the back. The emotion was outrage, then nothing. Leo absorbed it, the ghost of a rogue now living in his mind.
Finally, he approached the priest. The holy symbol on the man's chest made his new Mana Sense tingle with a residual, prickling heat. He devoured him last.
[Soul Energy +120]
[Soul Energy reserves insufficient for new skill acquisition. Energy stored.]
The Echo was the strongest yet. Blinding, zealous faith. The crushing weight of duty. The devastating realization that his holy power was useless against the corruption here, that it shattered against it like glass. And a final, scholarly detachment as his neck snapped: 'The thesis was correct. The Gloomwood's corruption negates Dawn-aligned energies. A fascinating, terminal discovery.'
When it was over, Leo stood amid three piles of dust and discarded equipment, thrumming with stolen power and haunted by ghostly memories.
He searched the dust. The leather scout yielded a few copper coins. The priest yielded something far more valuable: a small, water-stained leather journal and a folded piece of parchment.
He opened the journal to the last written entry. The handwriting was neat, precise, and frantic.
"Fourthday, Waxing Moon.
"The Gloomwood's corruption is not mere miasma. It is an active, intelligent counter-force. Our sanctification rites sparked a backlash that drew the attention of a 'Weald Walker'—a entity of animated stone and rot. Brother Fenric is dead. Sister Ilane's wounds will not accept healing; the corruption fights our light. My own power is diminished here, like trying to kindle a fire in a storm.
"The dungeon core in this temple is unstable, a wound leaking this corruption. It must be the focal point. Our mission is a failure.
"Recommendation: A full Cleansing Expedition, no less than a company of Dawn Knights with supported inquisitors, must be deployed within the fortnight. This temple must be scoured with purifying flame before the corruption spreads further. May the Dawn forgive our failure.
"— Brother-Captain Arlen of the Third Luminas Scout Company."
A fortnight. Two weeks.
The words were a cold clock ticking in his mind. A company of knights. Purifying flame.
He was the corruption they would scour.
He unfolded the map. It showed a section of the 'Southern Gloomwood Weald.' His temple was marked with a small, red 'X' and the word 'FESTERING'. Other symbols dotted the parchment: possible monster dens, a nearby river, and far to the north, the sketched walls of a frontier town named 'Fallback.'
Information. A timeline. A goal. For the first time, his world had contours, even if they were the walls of his own grave.
His new Mana Sense twitched. He focused on the priest's dust, where the holy symbol had lain. There, flickering like the last ember of a fire, was a tiny knot of golden energy. It was pure, bright, and felt… agonizingly alien. It repelled his senses even as «Ahamkara»'s hunger stretched toward it.
Residual Holy Power.
Touching it, he instinctively knew, would be like grasping a white-hot coal. It might sear his undead soul. But the hunger whispered that to consume something so opposed to his nature… the power could be transformative.
The golden ember glowed in the dark chamber, a tiny, deadly star.
A choice. A risk.
And two weeks until the fire came.