If I didn’t fit intact, I would need to come apart. Wanting to get this over with as quickly as possible, I ripped off my head with both hands. My body slumped down as I lost contact between my skull and my spine, but I could move again after a moment. I rolled my head through the gap and set about ripping my arms free.

  Ripping off an arm is much easier than you’d think, especially with leverage. Manipulating blood and bone helps a lot as well. The true challenge was ensuring I took the shoulder off as well. There was no point losing my arms if I was going to remain just as wide.

  I focused on using blood to chew through the muscles, and used bone manipulation to peel my shoulder blade off my back. My arm fell free from my body, as neatly ripped as folded paper. It took a moment to split my focus, but I stopped the dripping blood and drew it all back into my arm.

  I tore the second arm away with much the same method. My torso immediately collapsed without anything to support it. When it struck the ground, my guts spilled out of my severed abdomen.

  “Damn,” I grumbled in the dark.

  “Oh, no!” sang the bricks. “The snow melts into slush, and the smells of the city bloom! Dog turds and garbage and all the frozen treats!”

  I glowered at the bricks, but forced myself to focus on the task.

  Manipulating the blood and bone together gave me much greater control over my limb, even when it was detached. With concentration, I could even make them float, but that made doing anything extremely difficult.

  I tried to use my arms like chopsticks to pick up my organs, but it was so cumbersome I just resorted to using blood control to slurp my organs back into their cavity.

  I sent my arms wriggling through the hole with a sigh. After watching what Cabbagy could do, I knew it would take significant practice to take my abilities beyond my rudimentary efforts. Now wasn’t the time, but I started planning for later. After the last few days, I knew I needed to train my abilities, my fighting ability, and I needed to start coming up with backup plans. I’d been thrust into so many situations I never expected, that it would pay to start expecting some.

  Such as what to do when caught in a lie, or confronting talking demonic spirit beasts, or after I was crushed by a fallen building.

  Letting the act of planning soothe my mind, I inched my torso through the gap by flexing my spine like the yellow caterpillars the chickens used to eat from our vegetable garden.

  I ate a few of those caterpillars myself during springtime in Shadowlight City. They always made me delirious.

  If I could have felt pain, I’m not sure I could have pushed through doing all that. There were some serious scrapes and bruises along my ribs after pushing it through that gap in the rubble.

  “The bird enters the nest,” sang the bricks. “Though the tree shakes under the mighty storm!”

  “Hush,” I hissed at them. “Your damned singing will bring down these bricks.”

  The rubble above me groaned as the choir practice sent tremors through the mass. I needed to get out.

  Keeping as silent as possible, I used blood and bone control to snake my body parts through the cracks and crevices in the collapsed pagoda. A few times, I needed to push my way through an obstacle, but that became a massive drain on my already strained willpower.

  Moving my body parts independently was like swimming upstream, but I found I could make it easier by having the limbs crawl along the ground using their natural muscles rather than forcing them to float through the air.

  Blood coursed through my fingers as they dragged my arms across the ground faster than a rat or a snake. My torso inched behind my arms, and my head rolled at the rear.

  The worst part was getting so dizzy.

  I found my legs, and it was quite a wonderful reunion, especially because my toes had detected airflow.

  Crawling along the trail of fresh air led me to an empty, well-lit room. There, I set about reassembling. Since my willpower was so strained, I felt the draining effect of my rapid healing. There were finer controls there, and I could slow down the healing if needed, but I couldn’t think of a good reason to slow my healing down as I put my body parts back together like a broken doll.

  Though bashed to pieces, my body fixed itself before my eyes.

  My neck crunched like fried pork skin as I swivelled my head around to face the correct way. I tensed up immediately. I knew this room.

  Blank grey stone walls. A perfect cube. A bed. A tap. A formation set into the ceiling that gave off soft white light.

  My freshly restored heart seized.

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  I was back inside the facility.

  ###

  I panicked.

  ###

  I stood in a blank, grey stone room identical to the one I’d woken up inside after the bag went over my head. The door was open, just like it had been in my cell.

  Terrible fear crawled over me like an army of ants.

  Had I ever left?

  I glanced behind myself — certain I would see my bunk set against the stone behind me — but the shadow-shrouded rubble remained. The bricks continued their off-key chorus about finding mushrooms in autumn.

  This wasn’t my room. Good. Letting out a sigh I didn’t need, I walked toward the open door, but I stopped and glanced down to the side.

  A tap sat there opposite a toilet.

  I stood, and I waited for I don’t know how long. To tell the truth, I don’t even know if I was hoping the tap would drip or not. All I know is that the tap was as dry and silent as all things swallowed by time.

  With another sigh, I walked through the open door and entered an identical corridor to the one from my facility. I closed the cell door behind me to block off the sound of the singing bricks. The door locked shut with the familiar snap that would haunt my nightmares if I could ever sleep. Even the — brief? — bout of unconsciousness under the rubble had been dreamless.

  Just to be sure, I turned back and tried the handle on the door — locked. If that became a problem, it would be a problem later.

  The rest of the corridor only held a handful of cells, which was the only real proof I had that I wasn’t in the same facility I woke up inside. Each cell had the same heavy metal doors with thick glass windows. Exactly like my facility.

  “Did the same person make all these?” I wondered aloud.

  “Yes…” a voice groaned from further down the corridor. “All the ones in this… region…”

  I hadn’t heard that voice before, but the way they spoke sounded familiar… if deeply ill.

  “Ghost Fang?” I asked.

  “Yes…” said the voice sadly.

  I followed down the hall toward an open door at the end. Blessedly, the thick infrastructure deadened the singing bricks. The cell doors were all open, and each one had a floor stained black with spilled blood. It looked as though some animal — or somebody — had exploded in the center of each room. The gore coated each wall evenly.

  The only untouched cell was the one I’d entered from the rubble.

  Faint fumes trickled out along the ceiling as I ducked into the dark room. It was clearly a laboratory. A large, familiar glass tube was set into one wall, though this tube was horizontal instead of vertical. A sequence of arrays lined the other walls. I ignored the complicated controls etched into the wall and the glowing crystals as I made my way to the tube.

  Instead of green liquid, viscous grey smoke billowed out of a crack in the glass, and it was these fumes that trickled up toward the ceiling and into the pagoda. The fumes obscured my view into the tube.

  A thin hand slapped against the inside of the glass. The fingers were too long and too nobbly to be human.

  I peered closer as the fumes parted and revealed a half-dead three-foot slug at the bottom of the tube. Two spindly arms protruded from each side, and a growth that looked like a sleeping head emerged from one end. Thin wisps of flame billowed up from tiny slits in the half-sealed eyes as the creature shook and wobbled.

  “Have you come to destroy me?” spoke a voice that was half in my head and half vibrating mucous. “Have you come to destroy Ghost Fang?”

  I looked down at the frail, head thing, and I thought about lying. Maybe I could deceive some information out of Ghost Fang’s weakened true form. The lies I’d need were easy enough to think of, and he clearly couldn’t do anything to stop me.

  But it just felt kind of mean.

  “Sorry, Ghost Fang,” I said. “Two days ago, I’d never heard of you, but now I am going to kill you.”

  “Why?”

  “You killed people.”

  “They were mortals, strangers to you…”

  “Yeah, well,” I said as my face scrunched up in an effort to summarise the feelings conjured by three overlapping pasts. “It was wrong.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ghost Fang wheezed. “You are a demonic cultivator…”

  “I’m not even a cultivator.”

  Ghost Fang wheezed, a sharp, shuddering sound like sliding gravel, and it took me a minute to realise the painful sound was laughter.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I see the error in my ways,” he said. “I thought someone had finally come to release me from this cage… or at least… join me… but you are as lost as I am.”

  I frowned at his words.

  “You came from that clean cell, didn’t you?” I asked. “You were the successful experiment from this facility?”

  “Experiment? Yes. Successful? No… I doubt this is the fate of a success…”

  “Who did this? Who built these facilities? Who abducted me?”

  “The Hidden Lotus.”

  I clenched my teeth in frustration.

  “That name means nothing to me,” I said slowly. “Who are they? What are they trying to achieve? Why did they abduct me?”

  Another wheezing chuckle came from his lips.

  “No… You have nothing to bargain with… I will tell you nothing…”

  I considered offering his life. I considered torturing him for the information. Both options left a foul taste in my mouth.

  “Fine,” I said.

  I wrapped blood around my fist and punched the tube. Spiderwebbed cracks spread, and after a few more punches, I shattered the glass enough to reach inside and grab the slug. His squishy flesh tore under my fingers.

  Ghost Fang let out a harsh squeal.

  “You know nothing because you are a failure like me…” he coughed as my fingers sank into his body, the blood tearing at his meat. “They will destroy you, just as you destroy me. Nowhere will be safe for you! All shall hunt you. The heavens and the hells will… what are you doing?”

  His feeble tentacle eyes stared at my dripping fingers as I leaned against the tube.

  “I’m waiting for you to finish,” I said with a smile. “It sounds like you’re going to tell me a lot I don’t know, and I appreciate that.”

  The large slug stared at me. The silence went on so long it grew awkward.

  “Go on,” I said as I gestured for him to continue. “You were saying something about the heavens and the hells?”

  He wheezed, the finger gouges in his grey flesh pulsing in time with his pained breaths.

  “I don’t want to anymore.”

  “Don’t be like that.”

  “No.”

  “Come on… what do the heavens and the hells want with little old me?”

  The slug stared at me, but I couldn’t read the expression on his… face? Did slugs have faces?

  “Do you have a face?”

  “You just scooped it out.”

  “Oh…”

  I almost apologised, but that would have been disingenuous. With a sigh, I resumed my murder. My fingers closed around Ghost Fang, and he let out a mucousy sigh as I crushed him into grey jelly.

  A strange pulse left his body and brushed over my skin like a puff of air. The vapors rising from the tube thinned and vanished. The room still smelled foul.

  I’d hoped for more answers from Ghost Fang’s true form, but I gained something nonetheless.

  I set down the smushed slug and opened my palm. Nestled on my goop-covered skin was a familiar shard of dark grey stone.

  (but I wouldn't be a writer if I didn't overthink everything, so there's a poll at the top of the page and you're feedback is much appreciated!)

  21 chapters ahead on Patreon.