He became aware of it slowly, the way you become aware of warmth after coming in from cold — not a sudden thing, but a gradual accumulation that crossed some threshold and announced itself.
The Cerberus's blood had soaked through everything.
He hadn't noticed during the fight. There had been too much else demanding his attention, and blood was simply an occupational constant on a battlefield — his own, the enemy's, the distinction becoming academic after the first few minutes of serious engagement. But now, sitting in the quiet of the basin with the creature's body cooling beside him, he could feel it. The blood had saturated his clothing from collar to boot, warm where it had soaked deepest, already drying at the edges into a dark, stiff crust. And beneath the surface of his skin, where normally he would feel only the exhausted blankness of a body running on empty — something else. Something that moved.
The blue light arrived before he fully articulated the question.
[New effect gained: Cerberus Blood Absorption]
[Cerberus Blood Absorption] — The ancient corrupted blood of the Cerberus has been absorbed through open wounds, permanently altering the host's physiology.
Mana Capacity increased by 150 — Corrupted mana channels widened and reinforced
Healing Speed increased by 40% — Cellular regeneration accelerated by demonic blood compounds
Vitality +50 — Muscle density and skeletal durability permanently increased
[HP: 21/150][Mana: 12/260]
He stared at the window for a long moment.
The wounds on his right thigh and left shoulder — the burns, the worst of what the fight had cost him — were still present, still real, still painful. But the pain had a different quality to it now. Less acute. Less insistent. The kind of pain that was already beginning the work of becoming memory rather than immediate fact. He pressed two fingers against the burn on his thigh and felt the tissue beneath — warmer than it should be, active, the healing already running faster than any natural process had a right to.
He dismissed the window, looked down at his blood-soaked hands, and decided not to think too carefully about what it meant that a dead demon's blood was currently rewriting his physiology. He had more immediate concerns.
He picked up his sword and walked toward the passage.
It was short. That surprised him.
After the scale of everything that had come before — the lily cavern, the underground forest, the volcanic biome — he had expected another long descent, another gradual revelation. Instead the passage ran straight and narrow for perhaps forty meters, the walls so densely veined with crimson that they needed no other light source, and then it simply ended in a chamber that was small enough to feel intimate after everything that had preceded it.
He stopped at the threshold and looked inside.
The chamber was circular, the ceiling low and domed, every surface — floor, walls, ceiling — covered in a continuous network of corrupted veins so thick and interwoven that the original rock was barely visible beneath them. They pulsed in the slowest rhythm he had encountered in the entire dungeon, deep and deliberate, like the heartbeat of something enormous that had been running down for a very long time. Crimson crystals had grown from the walls in dense clusters, larger than any he'd seen above, their light steady and unwavering.
At the center of the chamber, suspended.
Not standing. Not sitting. Suspended — held upright by chains that ran from her wrists and ankles to anchor points in the ceiling and floor, the chains themselves black and massive, each link the size of his forearm, covered in the same corrupted veins as everything else in this place. The chains glowed with a contained, purposeful light that was different from the ambient corruption — older, more deliberate, the light of something that had been designed rather than grown.
The figure within them was slight. A girl — or something that had once been a girl, before however long had done whatever this place does to a person. She wore the remnants of clothing that might once have been formal, even regal, the fabric long since degraded to something barely holding its original shape. Her hair was dark and long, floating faintly in an air current he couldn't feel, the way hair moves underwater. Her skin carried the faintest luminescence — not the crimson of the corruption around her, but something cooler, older, a light that seemed to belong to her rather than to this place.
Her eyes were open.
They found him the moment he crossed the threshold, and the intelligence behind them was immediate and unguarded — whatever this place had taken from her, it had not taken that.
Draven looked at the chains. Looked at her. Looked at the Cerberus blood still drying on his hands.
The key. It had to have come from the creature — he'd felt something dislodge during the fight, something that had clattered across the basin rock in the chaos of the final moments. He'd dismissed it as debris. He turned back toward the passage, retraced his steps to the basin edge, and found it near the Cerberus's right forepaw — a key, if a key could be said to be made of black bone and corrupted crystal fused together, its shape too deliberate to be anything else.
He carried it back into the chamber.
She tracked him across the floor with those open, careful eyes. Said nothing. The desperation was there — he could see it in the way her hands had tightened around the chains at the wrists, the only movement she'd made, the instinctive grip of someone who had been waiting for something so long that its arrival had become indistinguishable from another form of impossibility. But the guard was there too, layered over it, the wariness of someone who had learned — probably the hard way, probably long ago — that hope was the most dangerous thing a prisoner could carry.
He stopped in front of her.
Looked at the lock where the chain met the anchor at her wrists. Looked at the key in his hand.
"This will hurt," he said. "Or it won't. I don't know which."
He put the key in the lock.
It turned with a sound like the world exhaling — a long, resonant release of pressure that he felt in his chest and in the stone beneath his feet simultaneously, the corrupted light in the chains' veins flickering once and then going dark, the chains losing their tension all at once. The ankle locks released on their own a moment later, following the wrists, and she dropped.
He caught her before she reached the floor.
He lowered her carefully to the chamber floor and held her there, one arm supporting her back, and the chains that had held her lay around them both in dark, silent coils, the corruption draining out of them link by link like color leaving a wound.