The interior of the shack was a cramped. S.K. sat cross-legged on a floor of rough-hewn timber, his breath coming in ragged, shallow hitches. He had locked the heavy iron bolt on the door, but it felt like a paper shield against the true enemy already nesting inside his own body.His left arm lay across his lap, a limb that no longer felt like his own. Beneath the skin, thick, obsidian veins pulsed with a sickening, rhythmic life, spreading upward from his wrist where he got cut like ink dropped in a basin of milk.
"Fucking hell," S.K. wheezed, his voice a dry rasp.
"Stupid, bloody, sentimental old bastard."
He had written a Containment Array on the clothe he'd used to tie the wound and even made another which he used to tie his bicep,just above the wound but still, it was spreading. With a trembling right hand, he reached into his sack and withdrew a small, ornate box carved from cold-iron. Inside lay an artifact that looked like a mechanical scorpion, its body forged from brass and its stinger a needle of pure silver. It was a specialized purging tool, one of the few pieces of gear he had that could deal with Corruption. It worked by dealing a dose of its own corrupting characteristics in an attempt to cancel out the infection in a form of a neutralization reaction. He didn't hesitate. He pressed the mechanical insect against the crook of his elbow and triggered the mechanism. The scorpion's legs clamped into his flesh, and its silver stinger plunged deep. S.K. arched his back, a silent scream dying in his throat as the counter-venom—a cocktail of Corruption itself and neutralizing salts—rushed to meet the spread of the Black Ooze.He knew this wasn't just a physical infection. The ooze wasn't a natural byproduct of the Sapphire Salamander. It was a manufactured Characteristic—the residual essence of an unknown being, crafted with such surgical precision that it didn't just kill; it colonized. Characteristics were dangerous; they were the echoes of a soul's memories, resedual essence which when used right could reproduce its abilities in the form of Artifacts. When used wrong, they were capable of reanimating the dead or, in this case, overwriting the cognition of a living host. That was Corruption, the taking over of a being by another being on an existential level by infecting it with your essence essentially making another you. Whoever had tamed that Apex beast had done so by infecting it with this mental parasite.
"The scorpion's sting won't do it," he muttered, his vision blurring.
"The Evolution of a Salamander… is too high for even this to suffice. Tch, guess I'll have to get my hands dirty."
S.K. was only a Votary. He had been stuck at that level for decades, barred from climbing higher by the "reasons". But while he lacked the raw power of a Saint, he was arguably one of the world's greatest masters of Flow Manipulation. He was a surgeon of the soul.
He closed his eyes and summoned his Trait: 'The Hierophant.'
His first Resonant flared to life. The physical world vanished, replaced by a landscape of spiritual light. He saw the shack not as wood, but as a dull, static presence. More importantly, he 'saw' his own soul—a flickering, complex ember. And inside his arm, he saw the Characteristic. It looked like a nest of squirming, dark shadows, vibrating with a malicious intelligence. He deployed his second Resonant. He reached into the core of his being and detached a small fragment of his own soul, shaping it into a glowing, translucent hook. He began to circulate his Flow through the arm, attempting to snag the dark essence and pull it out. But every time his soul-hook tore away a shadow, two more grew in its place. It was a viral characteristic; it thrived on direct confrontation.
"Stubborn little shit," S.K. hissed.
He remembered the alleyway, the moment he had detonated a fragment of his soul to cause a ripple effect against the Sapphire clone. He would have to do it again, but internally. It was like performing surgery with a grenade and bursting a part of your soul wasn't exactly a pleasant experience.
The first attempt failed. The explosion of spiritual energy was too weak, merely agitating the ooze. S.K. coughed, his heart skipping a beat. He gritted his teeth, focused every ounce of his legendary Flow control, and tried again.
Crack.
A silent, spiritual shockwave rippled through his arm. The dark veins shivered and began to dissolve, the parasitic characteristic unable to maintain cohesion against the focused, vibrating frequency of S.K.'s self-detonated soul fragment.
He slumped back, sweat pouring down his face, his breath finally leveling out. But as he sat there, recovering, his mind drifted back to the blonde boy in the city. He remembered the image from his sensory sweep as he fled the scene: the boy coughing dark crimson liquid,drowning in his own blood, a wound to the heart that should have been a finality. The Black Ooze should have made any revival impossible. But he had seen Roric Thorne—the man he recognized from a time many years ago...
'I knew that purple haired girl looked familiar.'
Roric was infusing the boy with everything he had. And if Jamie was Roric's, then the other two... they were the children of Alaric and Elara.
'The Still and the 'Empress'.Well, this is their Land...Still Inever expected to run into all three of their offspring. What is thsi damn feeling? Pride?'
A smile began to play on his lips but quickly faded when he though of the boy, barely alive being carried off toward the Keep. He glanced at his arm which was slowly regaing color but still had a few dark patches here and there. Using the lingering connection, S.K. reached out with his first Resonant. He felt the presence those who had also been infected. Thye had gotten help and the corruption was fading away from them as well. He ignored them and sifted through the sea of souls in Blackhaven. until he inally, he found them.
He sensed the soul of Alaric, a monolith of granite-like stability, currently rippling with the effort of comforting his wife. Elara's soul was a turbulent nebula of distress and love as she fussed over her son, helping the healer by converting her immense Anti-Flow into Flow and attempting to Heal. S.K. paused, noticing a small, burgeoning light within her—another life forming.
"Another one on the way? Alaric, you busy bastard," S.K. muttered with a ghost of a smile.
Then, he focused on the boy. Elias.
Miraculously, the wound on his chest had healed somehow but the corruption remained. S.K. reached his soul-fragment toward the child, intending to help—to kill the lingering corruption and give the boy a fighting chance.
'If the boy dies,' he thought pragmatically, 'At least the parents have a replacement.'
But the moment S.K.'s spiritual perception touched Elias's soul, his blood ran cold.
He expected to find a soul being eaten by corruption. Instead, he found an impossibility.
Inside the boy was a vast infinity. It was a void so deep that it made the physical world feel like a shallow puddle. The Black Ooze—that terrible, manufactured corruption—wasn't destroying the boy. It was being devoured or rather, being drowned by the endlessness. The corruption was shrieking in spiritual agony, trying desperately to fight back against the waves that tried to swallow it. S.K. stood on the precipice of that vastness, his Hierophant lens trembling. His head ached as he tried to perceive the nature of the infinity, to understand what kind of "being" Alaric had actually sired.
Suddenly, the void shifted.
A voice, cold and echoing from a place beyond time, resonated through S.K.'s entire being. It wasn't spoken in words, but in a direct injection of meaning into his consciousness.
"You are a variable... that is not part of My plans. Depart."
A flash of blinding, absolute white light erupted. S.K. was hurled backward. The spiritual connection snapped with the force of a breaking mast. He fell back on the hard wooden floor of his shack , his ears ringing with a high-pitched, deafening whine.
He lay on his back for a few moments, staring up at the dark rafters, gasping for air. His skin was soaked in a cold, deathly sweat, and his hands were shaking so violently he had to tuck them under his armpits. The light faded from his eyes, leaving behind the dull, flickering candles of his workshop. He stayed there for a long time, listening to the frantic thumping of his own heart. He had seen something. He couldn't remember what he had seen or what he had heard but he knew that peering into the boys soul,he had seen something, a horizon beyond his understanding.
"What the bloody hell..." he whispered into the silence.
"What the bloody, absolute hell was that?"