He tried to circulate heat energy to heal the damage. The heat energy moved to the gray skin. The death energy burned it out quickly. The damage intensified. The skin on his knuckle split with a fine, dark crack.
His breath came out as a pale, steady mist. Each exhale felt like scraping ice, not from pain, but from the raw sensation of cold stripping heat away. He took another breath and felt nothing where a bruised lung should have hurt. His heartbeat stuttered, skipped, then slammed against his ribs hard enough to rattle them. No pain came with it. No relief either. I should be feeling that. I'm not.
He flexed his fingers. The movement was sluggish, his muscles responding a half-beat late. His fingernails darkened at the edges, turning brittle and black. Sensation kept fading, like his nerves were being wrapped in thick wool. He pinched the skin of his forearm. He registered the pressure, but none of the discomfort. Pain's gone. That's not resistance. That's a missing signal.
The cold worked deeper. A faint, constant vibration settled into his bones, a low hum that didn't stop. The skin on his arm tightened in patches and sagged in others, like it couldn't decide how to age. Fine lines etched themselves and then froze in place. I'm not healing. I'm not actively dying. I'm just... partially dead.
The whispers started. They weren't vague. They were distinct voices pressing against the inside of his skull, overlapping, speaking in broken pieces—names, last words, regrets. A physical pull centered in his chest, tugging him toward places of rot and silence. They're right here. Why am I on their frequency?
His thoughts slowed. Emotional responses thinned out. Fear arrived as a distant, intellectual concept, not a feeling. When he pictured the others, their images felt flat, weightless, already halfway to being memories. Why does this feel inevitable? Why doesn't it matter?
His arm trembled on its own, muscles twitching without command, pulling his posture subtly toward a resting state. His hunger vanished. His thirst vanished. The drive to breathe remained only out of habit. The concepts of hot and cold became abstract facts. If this continues, I won't recognize my own body's alerts.
The whispers grew louder, weaving through his own thoughts, interrupting them, finishing sentences he hadn't meant to form. Each new idea decayed before it could solidify. Memory didn't fade; it just lost its significance. His sense of himself stretched thin, fraying under the constant pressure. I am still conscious. I am still here. I don't feel real.
For a while there, the death energy was pure poison. It tried to rot him from the inside out. Then his body got the memo and adapted. Assimilation changed the game. His body quit trying to reject the energy. His organs figured it out. His nerves figured it out. Even the deep, weird parts of his soul got the new operating manual. They started running on death energy like it was a regular Tuesday.
Death stopped trying to dissolve his flesh. It stopped trying to empty his head. It became fuel. He wasn't turning into a zombie. There was no creepy corruption, no sudden collapse. Life and death just called a truce inside him. His system started operating on both at once, pulling strength from something ending the same way it pulled strength from something growing.
Biologically, he didn't die. He upgraded. The numbness faded, replaced by a cold, clear focus. He understood how things ended without feeling bad about it. He could sense decay without the fear. The whole concept of death lost its scary teeth. It was just another step. His emotions were still there, but they settled down. They weren't running on panic or raw dread anymore. He could see the value in being alive without needing to white-knuckle it. The result was a calm that felt solid and a little off, not because he was cruel or empty, but because he didn't jump at the things that made other people flinch.
If you can use any energy, death doesn't kill you. You just change. Soul energy was the opposite—pure, undiluted life force. A human body isn't built to store much of that. Once it was trapped in him, his body started churning out way more life energy than it was designed for. Normally, people drip-feed on energy from food, and their bodies are strict about the dosage. With soul energy flooding the system, those limits vanished. His muscles, nerves, and organs got constant, nonstop fuel. He was faster, stronger, and he didn't get tired. For a little while.
Using that much energy makes heat. The harder his body worked, the more heat built up inside. Normally, that heat would spike and cook him from the inside out in minutes. The only reason it didn't was because his body started absorbing that heat as more energy. It created a feedback loop instead of a meltdown.
The soul energy kept flooding in. His body was still producing more power than a human was meant to handle. It pushed his muscles, nerves, and organs past their design specs. That surge still generated the heat that should have boiled him alive. But now, just like with the death energy, his body absorbed that heat instead of dying from it. It turned the heat right back into usable power. Life fed death. Death fed life. Neither one won. He stayed alive—different, redefined, running on a balance where neither fuel was considered poison anymore.
[Energy Affinity Lvl 4 ? Energy Affinity Lvl 5]
A notification pinged in the back of his head. He glanced at it. Energy Affinity had finally ticked up to the next level. And quite easily at that.
It picked now to level. Right after I filled up on death juice and soul sauce.
Two new kinds of energy. Death energy feels... specialized. Soul energy probably is too. Maybe they're rare. Maybe that's what does it.
So the trick could be to find more weird energies. Try to sync with them. That might be how you make the Affinity skill grow.
[DeathBorn Lvl 1]
[Soul-Manipulator Lvl 1]
System messages scrolled past his vision, announcing two new skills: Deathborn and Soul-Manipulator. Deathborn. Okay. Born from death, or born to death? Either way, it's got 'grave' in the subtext. Soul-Manipulator. That's less poetic. Real 'hands-on' vibe. Sounds like a job for someone who messes with the wiring. One name was a description of what he might be now. The other was a manual for what he could probably do. They were both very literal.
The System had a real flair for the obvious. The naming committee had taken the day off.
He focused inward. The pressure built behind his eyes. The ashen screens slid into view, text scrolling until it locked onto the new entry: Deathborn.
[Deathborn: You have assimilated death into your being, rewriting body, soul, and mind to function on both life and death energy without decay, undeath, or corruption. Lethal injuries can be endured so long as some vital structure remains, though destruction of the heart or brain is still fatal. You can safely drain, release, and manipulate death energy, interact with the undead without domination, and traverse death-aligned realms unharmed. No longer bound to afterlives, death gods, or mortality-based curses, you exist as a new category of life—neither living nor dead—making you a destabilizing anomaly in the cosmic order that cannot be claimed, judged, or easily categorized.]
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‘You have assimilated death into your being, rewriting body, soul, and mind to function on both life and death energy without decay, undeath, or corruption.’
The cold clarity, the gray skin. It was far from a malfunction. It was the new operating system.
‘Lethal injuries can be endured so long as some vital structure remains, though destruction of the heart or brain is still fatal.’
So he could take shots that should kill him. As long as his head or heart didn't pop, he'd keep going. That changed the math on every fight from now on.
‘You can safely drain, release, and manipulate death energy, interact with the undead without domination, and traverse death-aligned realms unharmed.’
He could work with the energy now. He could talk to zombies without having to be their boss. There were entire places made of this stuff, and he could take a stroll through them. Useful, if you liked depressing vacations.
‘No longer bound to afterlives, death gods, or mortality-based curses, you exist as a new category of life—neither living nor dead—making you a destabilizing anomaly in the cosmic order that cannot be claimed, judged, or easily categorized.’
That was the real information. Afterlives were real. Death gods were real cops. There was a cosmic order with rules for souls. And he was now a free agent. The system had no box to put him in. The detached, operational stillness he felt—that was the feeling of being off the grid.
He could play with death energy now. His body was full of the stuff—it was part of the fuel mix. He could take more in, hold it, and push it around. Can I make a zombie with it? Do I point it at a corpse and think real hard? He also had demonic energy buzzing in his veins. What happens if I mix the death juice with the demon juice? Do they cancel out? Make something worse? He didn't have answers. Just new ingredients for problems.
He shifted his focus on the status screen to the other new skill: Soul-Manipulator. The text filled the ashen space.
[Soul-Manipulator: Your body has been saturated with life and soul energy, reforged to integrate it at a cellular level, allowing it to absorb and recycle energy that would normally destroy a human, creating a state of permanent peak biological efficiency. This grants limited soul manipulation, the only active ability, while automatically halting aging, disease, decay, fatigue, and minor wounds, accelerating cognition, and radiating internal energy as heat and pressure. Your soul is no longer anchored to gods or afterlives, but bound directly to your physical form; should your heart or brain be destroyed and you die, the outcome is unknown, and if your body is completely destroyed, your soul will be permanently erased from existence.]
The description was a list of absences: no fatigue, no sickness, no aging. Minor wounds would heal themselves. What was a minor wound? A lost finger? Or a paper cut? He tried to feel the lack. He couldn’t. You can’t feel the absence of tiredness, only the presence of not being tired. It was a change in his baseline he couldn’t perceive directly, only infer. The skill meant his fatigue was gone for good. But he had already guessed something was similar with heat energy.
The remaining implications of the skill landed in his mind. His long-term plans immediately rearranged themselves.
Before, a huge chunk of survival involved fortifying a metal hole to crawl into, a safe spot to sleep, and patch himself and the others up. That whole category of problem was just deleted. It still existed for the others, but not for David. He could go and go and go. Places that would give someone else a fatal infection were just landscapes now. His body wasn’t a thing that broke down anymore. It was a tool that stayed sharp.
The rest of the skill was stranger. There was one active thing he could do. He could fiddle with souls. A little bit. What did that even mean? Limited manipulation. Could he touch a soul? See it? It was a button on the console. He could press it. He had no idea what it did.
There it was again. Gods and afterlives were real, and he was off their radar—but it came with a catch. If something blew him to atoms, that was it. The ultimate, high-stakes trade-off. He felt invincible until he imagined being completely vaporized, which felt like a very specific thing to worry about. The warmth under his skin felt more vulnerable then. It was all he had.
He felt incredibly durable and completely fragile at the same time. One skill was about using death. The other was about being a perfect, souped-up life engine. Together, they meant he didn’t fit anywhere.
Jamie spoke up. "Can't you use your portal to get us out of here?"
David looked at the wall. He thought it probably wouldn't work, but he saw no reason not to try. "I can try."
He focused and cut. The dark line sliced into the ice. It went through, bisecting the wall cleanly, but the ice was several feet thick. The cut didn't reach the other side. Before he could cut again, the ice where he'd cut replenished itself, becoming solid and seamless once more. It's repairing itself. Fast. Maybe it's still pulling life from the trees to do it.
The attempt solidified that they couldn't cut their way out. Since they couldn't go out, they all looked at the only other thing inside with them: the temple. They had to go through whatever was inside.
His elite hobgoblin thrall stared at the stone archway. A profound wariness came through the thrall link. The creature possessed a vague, instinctual knowledge of the place.
David glanced at Mara’s unconscious body. She looked like a bag of half-set concrete someone had dropped from a roof. Not a great look.
“Alright, big guy,” he said to the hobgoblin. “Do me a favor and relocate the dying necromancer. Over by the entrance is fine. Just don’t let her tip over and finish the job.”
The hobgoblin thrall moved with a grunt, gathering her up with a surprising lack of drama. It placed her a few paces from the dark temple doorway, leaning her against the cold stone like a forgotten umbrella. Functional.
David turned to face the entrance. The darkness inside wasn’t a natural dark. It was the kind that looked like it would feel sticky.
“Okay,” he said, more to himself than to the thrall. “Step one: see what’s in the murder-hole. You’re up,” David said, pointing at the dark archway. "Go take a look inside."
The hobgoblin froze. A sudden, visceral punch of fear hit him through the thrall bond.
The hobgoblin didn’t refuse—it couldn’t—but its knuckles went bone-white around its sword hilt. For a second, David was pretty sure it was about to run; walking in there was what its kind called a very bad idea.
Everyone's a critic. David reinforced the order. He pushed a simple concept down the link:
David waited. He counted seconds in his head. The thrall bond hummed, a live wire of sheer, unadulterated dread. David sent back a quick sense of following, which did nothing to calm it down. After a minute, the link was still there. It was breathing. No screaming, no sudden silence.
“Is it… safe?” Jamie whispered. He was practically breathing down David’s neck.
“The scout hasn’t been instantly vaporized. That’s the current definition of ‘safe.’ Let’s go audit the problem.”
Jamie swallowed hard but nodded, and they moved closer.
The giant eye that only he could see above the temple was still fixed on him. It followed his walk to the entrance, then sank lower, hovering just above the roof and staring down at where he stood. It never stopped watching.
David approached cautiously, Jamie attached to his side like a remora. Crossing the threshold was like walking into a meat locker that had been used to age spoiled game. The cold was damp, the air thick with the iron tang of old blood and something sweetly rotten.
The temple was one big room. And in the middle of it was the local decor.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Jamie breathed, his voice cracking.
The hobgoblin stood frozen about twenty feet ahead, staring at the room’s centerpiece.
In the middle, chained to the floor, kneeling, was a thing that made the last demon look like an agitated puppy. The chained thing was the size of a dump truck. Its arms were pillars of corded muscle and dark, scaly hide, thicker than ancient oaks, ending in four-fingered hands with claws that looked like they could pry open a bank vault. Its legs were braced like hydraulic presses, ending in great, cloven hooves that had cracked the stone beneath them. A tail as thick as a constrictor snake coiled behind it, tipped with a vicious, spear-like point. It had no head. Its torso bulged into a massive beer keg of a gut that held a giant, bottomless black mouth. The mouth had black, crusted lips that quivered and leaked drool as they walked in. Spiked horns jutted from its shoulders. Plates of dark scale armor covered its chest and forearms, clattering against its restraints.
The chains themselves were the issue. They blazed in David's sight, so full of demonic energy and another, heavier power that it was like staring at a welder's torch. He raised a hand to shade his eyes.
A system marker burned into existence above the chained creature. A hot needle of pain lanced behind David's eyes as the text appeared, crowded with more detail than he was used to getting.
[Temple Demon — Soul Eater Variant, Thar'Zul the Devourer of Penitence Lvl 50].
As David watched, the giant eye sank through the stone ceiling of the temple. It drifted down to hover directly above the chained demon, floating where a head should have been.
"You really don't see the giant eye up there, do you?" David asked.
Jamie looked at the empty space above the demon, his face confused. "See what?"
David looked back at the creature. Its spiked, armored forearms were each as big as he was. Its anaconda-thick tail swayed with the smooth dexterity of a live serpent. The drooling maw in its gut was as wide as a double doorway. The name above it declared it a soul eater.
"Nope," David said.
He turned and walked back outside.