The alchemist kept calling it the thing. GR1m1 heard the word each time the man spoke to his assistants, a quick mutter as if naming it properly might give it weight. From GR1m1’s cot the word carried a blunt edge. He didn’t know what else to call it either. The memory sat in him like a bruise he couldn’t reach.

  The room stayed busy in the days after. Metal trays clattered. Glass scraped against stone. The alchemist moved between tables with short, clipped steps, sleeves rolled past his elbows, hands stained from whatever he had carved open that morning. GR1m1 watched him sort through the remains of beasts he had never seen alive. Bones stacked in narrow rows. Strips of muscle pinned under hooks. Darkened blood thickening in bowls. The smell clung to the air, sharp enough to sting the inside of GR1m1’s nose.

  The man kept checking each piece against GR1m1’s frame. He pressed bone against GR1m1’s arm, then held it to the light, then set it aside for another. He muttered measurements under his breath. Sometimes he paused long enough to study GR1m1’s ribs through the skin, as if waiting for something to shift on its own.

  The symbiote inside him stirred whenever the alchemist brought a new sample close. GR1m1 felt it move under the surface, a slow pull toward the scent of orc marrow or the thicker ogre tissue. The alchemist noticed. He gave a short nod and marked something on a slate.

  The plan had been explained once. GR1m1 remembered the words only in fragments. New bones combined with a new tissue. A body that could hold more weight, more strain, able to take a few punches. The alchemist said the symbiote would take what it needed and shape the rest. GR1m1 didn’t know how that worked. He only knew the process left him tired in a way that didn’t fade with sleep.

  They worked on him piece by piece. A bone replaced. A joint adjusted. There also were sections of different muscle areas pressed against his skin until the symbiote drew it inward. Each change brought a dull ache that settled deep. The alchemist checked him every hour, tapping along his limbs, listening for some shift only he could hear. GR1m1 lay still through it all. Movement made the aches flare.

  Days blurred. The lamps burned low, then bright again. Assistants carried in fresh buckets of water and carried out trays of scraps. GR1m1 lost track of how many times the alchemist said steady under his breath. The man said it the same way each time, as if the word itself kept the work from slipping out of control.

  Weeks passed rapidly… Then months. GR1m1 felt the changes before he understood them. His arms had been remade anew despite what he believed it to be the opposite from what was called in the meeting, it seems carried more weight without shaking. His spine was fixed so it held straighter when he pushed himself upright. The symbiote inside together with the alchemists meddling inside of him settled the parts in place and made it into its new structure with a slow, deliberate pull that left his skin warm.

  One morning the alchemist stepped back from him and didn’t reach for another tool. He wiped his hands on a cloth and pointed at the floor. After long months of processes the legs were also studied for him to be capable of moving in the near future. It took longer as they had to invest and look for more ogres and orcs to implant their flesh and bone on him.

  Then after analyzing all the data everything would be ready… the alchemist stood in front of him and said with a deeper voice as if it was a calling: “Stand.” it seems they had discovered Gr1m1 knew their language. So more or less now his plan had to change, or else he would be discovered.

  GR1m1 pushed his palms against the cot. His arms didn’t buckle. He shifted his weight forward. His feet found the ground. For a moment he stayed there, unsure if the strength would hold. The alchemist didn’t speak. He only watched.

  GR1m1 straightened. His knees wobbled, but they didn’t give. The room tilted slightly, then steadied. He drew in a breath through his nose. The air tasted of metal and old blood. He stayed upright.

  The alchemist gave a short nod. “Walk.” as if it was giving an order…

  GR1m1 lifted one foot. The movement felt unfamiliar, as if the limb belonged to someone else. He set it down. The second step came easier. On the third his balance slipped. His shoulder hit the floor first. The impact rattled through his ribs.

  The alchemist didn’t rush to him. He crouched nearby and tapped the floor with two fingers. “Again.” merciless looking down on him calling him while snapping his fingers as if it was his pet.

  GR1m1 pushed himself up. His arms trembled from the effort. He stood up, fell and kept on trying again. One became two steps... Three became four... A stumble between them is always normal. The floor met him each time with the same hard certainty.

  The man had him move in every direction. Forward… Back... Sideways... In circles until it could only see circles. Small distances came first, then wider. GR1m1 followed each instruction. His legs dragged at times. His hips caught on movements he hadn’t practiced. Sweat gathered along his spine. His breath came uneven. The alchemist watched and took notes in every shift of weight, every misstep, every correction.

  By the end of the day GR1m1’s limbs felt heavy, but the heaviness carried a new shape. He could stand without support. He could move without collapsing immediately. The cot no longer felt like the only place his body belonged.

  He returned to it anyway. The alchemist wrote notes at the table, scratching lines across the slate. GR1m1 lay on his back and stared at the ceiling beams. His chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm. The ache in his legs pulsed, but it didn’t frighten him.

  He had stood. He had walked. The thought settled in him with a weight different from the aches. He didn’t name it. He didn’t know how to. He only knew he would stand again tomorrow. And the day after. And every day until the alchemist stopped pointing at the floor and started pointing at the door.

  The alchemist brought the next tray in with both hands. The metal clinked against the table as he set it down. GR1m1 pushed himself upright on the cot, the movement slow, his limbs still adjusting to the weight they carried. The man didn’t speak at first. He unwrapped a cloth and revealed two eyes resting in a shallow pool of clear fluid. Their surface held a faint sheen, as if they had been pulled from a creature that hadn’t fully cooled.

  GR1m1 leaned forward. The eyes tracked nothing, yet something in them held a strange alertness. The alchemist tapped the edge of the tray with a fingertip.

  “Werewolf,” he said. “Already transformed when it died.”

  GR1m1 didn’t know what that meant beyond the obvious. He only knew the scent rising from the tray carried a sharp, wild note that made the symbiote shift under his skin. The alchemist noticed the movement and gave a short grunt, not quite approval, not quite concern.

  The man worked with steady hands. He lifted one eye with a hooked tool and brought it close to GR1m1’s face. The scent grew stronger. GR1m1 felt a pull deep behind his own eyes, a faint tug as if the symbiote reached toward the new tissue. The alchemist pressed the werewolf eye against the side of GR1m1’s head. The surface of the eye touched his skin. A warmth spread outward. The symbiote drew it in.

  The second eye followed. The warmth deepened. GR1m1 blinked. The room sharpened. Shadows along the walls gained edges he hadn’t noticed before. The alchemist stepped back and watched him without speaking.

  More trays arrived. Assistants carried them in with stiff arms, careful not to spill the contents. The next set held organs darker than anything GR1m1 had seen. The alchemist uncovered them with slow movements, as if the cloth itself might disturb whatever lay beneath.

  “Vampire,” he said. “Pure line. Died in the same fight as the werewolf.”

  GR1m1 studied the organs. Their surface held a faint pulse, not movement, but something close. The alchemist explained pieces of it to his assistants, not to GR1m1. Words like lineage and direct descent passed between them. GR1m1 caught fragments. He didn’t understand all of it. He didn’t need to. The scent alone told him these organs carried something potent.

  One of the assistants came in a hurry carrying both hearts to the table and wanted to check what could happen if the symbiote recognized the vital organs, as they were really valuable in alchemy, some said that if it belonged to the right heir, and the body was compatible, the creature could inherit their origin or at least partially their power, but that had been a rumored for far too long so they had to put it to the test.

  The alchemists present loved the idea, their bosses. But who else would love it even more, the assistants. They would love it if they discovered even before them, with all the achievements it would lead to they might get rich fast and achieve something of value as that is what was granted to the achievers there. The vampire tissue against the werewolf samples was instantly merging with GR1m1’s skin as soon as it made contact. The two sets of flesh touched and on both sides of the body caused a reaction as if they were finding their place inside his body. GR1m1 felt the symbiote react immediately to avoid being taken over. Inside for GR1m1 it felt like a slow pull. A deeper warmth. It felt so strange with little to no rejection. No sudden spike of pain. The alchemist watched closely, his eyes narrowing as if waiting for some violent shift. None came to be it seems. But then as they get the hearts to the sides opposed to where they inserted the tissues, everything went down hill. Gr1m1 was agonizing in pain, twisting everything limb in his body with his flesh vessels clearly shown through his own very skin. He could not scream, at the very moment he tried to, the assistants strangled him with the straps to avoid alerting their bosses.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  After a few minutes of almost losing it the symbiote accepted both sources. It drew them inward with the same steady rhythm it had used for the bones. GR1m1 felt the changes settle into him. Not all at once. Not cleanly. More like a slow spread through nerves that had never carried this kind of signal before.

  He blinked again. The room sharpened further. He could see the faint rise and fall of an assistant’s chest across the room. He could see the twitch of a finger near the alchemist’s belt. He could see dust on the far shelf, each grain distinct.

  A scent reached him next. Not the usual mix of metal and old blood. Something else. The assistant closest to him carried a faint trace of fear-sweat. GR1m1 didn’t know the word for it, but his body recognized it. His head turned toward the source before he realized he had moved.

  The alchemist raised a hand. “Hold.”

  GR1m1 froze. The scent faded as the assistant stepped back. Another sound reached him. A heartbeat. Not his own. Someone near the doorway… Slow... Steady… He turned his head again. The alchemist followed his gaze and let out a short breath.

  “So it works,” the man said.

  GR1m1 didn’t answer, he was almost out of air for the incident from before. But besides almost dying again… He didn’t know how to describe what he felt. His nerves carried signals they had never carried before. His head felt crowded with new input. The room no longer held stillness. Every body in it produced sound, scent, movement. His eyes caught details he had never noticed. His ears picked up breaths, cloth shifting, the faint scrape of a boot on stone.

  The alchemist moved to the table and flipped through his notes. He muttered to himself, tapping the page with the end of a quill. GR1m1 caught pieces of it. Unprecedented. No rejection. Mixed traits. Possible replication? The man didn’t sound certain. He sounded like someone trying to fit a new shape into an old theory.

  GR1m1’s gaze drifted to the far wall. A set of weapons leaned against it. He could see the dried blood on the blade edges. The scent rising from them carried traces of the same creatures whose organs now rested inside him. The scent of blood sent to his brain images of the bodies the alchemist had mentioned. Scenes of a skirmish nearby. Werewolves and vampires tearing into each other for reasons no one explained.

  He didn’t know why they fought. He didn’t know why their remains had ended up on the alchemist’s table. He only knew that whatever had happened to him had started with that battle. The alchemist had said as much. Something about the timing. Something about the way the symbiote reacted when exposed to both sources. Could this new changes had something to do with his recent changes, could he now learn if the world from blood smelled through his senses and read magic by writing it.

  GR1m1 shifted on the cot. His fingers curled against the blanket. The new senses didn’t settle. They kept feeding him information. Heartbeats... Breaths… The faint scrape of a quill. The smell of old blood. The sharper scent of fresh tissue. The alchemist’s own scent, a mix of sweat and herbs.

  The man finally looked up from his notes. “No one has ever reacted like this,” he said. “Not even close.”

  GR1m1 didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know if the man expected an answer. The alchemist stared at him for a long moment, as if trying to see the changes beneath the skin.

  “It’s as if something new formed,” the man said. “Not a werewolf… Not a vampire... Not human, that wasn't in the picture any longer... Something else.”

  GR1m1 held his gaze. The new eyes didn’t blink as often. The alchemist noticed that too. He wrote another line on the slate.

  The room felt different now. Not because it had changed, but because GR1m1 could sense every person in it without looking, as he closed his eyes he could feel their emotions… Their breaths… Their steps... Their shifting weight… Their fear near his presence…

  The symbiote settled deeper into him, adjusting to the new organs with slow, deliberate pulls. Whatever he had become, it wasn’t finished yet.

  One of the assistants whispered a word while sorting the notes. Quimera or a Hybrid of sorts or even better a Mutant. GR1m1 caught it from the cot, their derogatory way of calling him a monster. The man said it as if naming a specimen for a shelf. The others didn’t argue. They wrote it down. The word didn’t mean anything to GR1m1, but the way they used it told him enough. Something not one thing or another. Something they didn’t have a place for.

  The symbiote inside him didn’t care about names. It kept pulling at the new tissues, adjusting them, testing them. GR1m1 felt the movements under his skin. Slow at first… but as time went by it got sharper. The nerves along his spine fired in short bursts. His fingers curled without him telling them to. His jaw clenched. The alchemist watched from the table, quill paused above the slate, to check for other outburst.

  The changes didn’t settle. They built. His ribs tightened around his lungs. His breath caught halfway in. He tried again... The air stopped at the same point. A pressure spread across his chest. He pushed his palm against it, but the pressure didn’t move. The vampire organs had been explained to him in fragments. Something about breath loss… but how come if he was already dead… Something about the body shutting down before it rebuilt itself. He didn’t understand the details. Gr1m1 understood the sensation now.

  His vision sharpened and blurred in turns. The werewolf's eyes kept activating in, showing more and more detail of the atmosphere and the small microorganisms in air. At this point he was seeing smells; it was more than his mind could sort. The room tilted. His knees hit the cot frame. The alchemist stepped closer but didn’t touch him.

  The symbiote twisted again. This time the movement reached bone. A crack sounded inside him. Not loud… More like a branch bending under weight. GR1m1 gripped the edge of the cot. His fingers dug into the fabric. Another crack followed. Then another. His spine shifted. His shoulders pulled forward. His jaw tightened until his teeth pressed against each other.

  The alchemist murmured something to an assistant. GR1m1 didn’t catch the words. His hearing filled with the sound of his own bones adjusting. One mentioned the resemblance to the werewolf transformation, as it had been described once to him. Bones breaking to rebuild stronger. He hadn’t understood what that meant until now. The sensation didn’t stay in one place. It moved through him in waves. A joint shifting. A rib adjusting. A tendon pulling tight, then loosening. As his hearing kept increasing and expanding to the whole facility… faintly he could hear the chirp of birds at a really long distance…

  His breath still wouldn’t come fully. The vampire organs kept his lungs from expanding. His chest rose only halfway before stopping. His throat felt narrow. His vision dimmed at the edges. He forced another breath. It caught again. His fingers trembled against the cot.

  The symbiote didn’t stop. It kept pulling the two sets of traits together. GR1m1 felt the conflict inside him. One source trying to shut the body down. The other trying to rebuild it through force. The symbiote threaded between them, taking pieces from each, refusing to let either one take control.

  His back arched. A sharp crack ran along his spine. His head dropped forward. Sweat gathered along his neck. His legs shook. The cot creaked under his weight. The alchemist didn’t intervene. He watched with narrowed eyes, quill ready.

  GR1m1’s breath thinned to short pulls. His chest burned. His vision narrowed to a thin tunnel. The pressure in his ribs grew until he thought they might split. Another crack sounded. His left arm jerked. His fingers curled inward. His shoulder shifted in its socket.

  No creature should or could survive this. He knew that without needing anyone to say it. The body wasn’t meant to endure two transformations at once. The vampire’s suffocation. The werewolf’s bone-breaking rebuild. Either one alone could end a life. Both together should have ended his.

  But the symbiote held him in place. It kept pulling. It kept adjusting. It kept forcing the body to accept the changes.

  GR1m1 pressed his forehead against the cot frame. His breath came in thin threads. His ribs kept shifting. His spine kept cracking. His vision flickered. He didn’t know how long it lasted.

  The room lost its shape. The sounds blurred. The scents sharpened. His nerves fired in every direction.

  He stayed conscious through all of it.

  The alchemist finally stepped closer. He didn’t touch GR1m1. He only watched the way the body settled after each shift. The man’s eyes moved from joint to joint, tracking the changes as if mapping a new creature.

  GR1m1’s breath caught again. Then something inside him loosened. The pressure in his chest eased. His lungs expanded a little more. Not fully. Enough to pull in a deeper breath. The air reached farther this time. His ribs didn’t resist as much.

  Another crack. This one softer. His spine aligned. His shoulders settled. His fingers uncurled.

  The worst of the twisting slowed. The symbiote’s movements grew steadier. The nerves along his arms stopped firing at random. His vision steadied. The room regained its shape.

  He stayed on the cot, chest rising in uneven pulls. Sweat soaked the fabric beneath him. His limbs felt heavy, but they held their shape. The alchemist wrote something on the slate, the sound sharp in the quiet.

  GR1m1 didn’t know what he had become. He only knew he had survived something no creature should. The alchemist had said the world outside belonged to the strong. GR1m1 didn’t know if he was strong yet. But he knew he wasn’t finished.

  The symbiote shifted once more, a small adjustment under the skin.

  He wasn’t going to be the exception. He was going to be the reason they rewrote their notes.

  “???????? ??? ???????... ?????? ???? ?? ???????? ?? ?????? ?? ??? ?? ?????????...”

  “Monsters are mirrors... showing only the darkness we refuse to see in ourselves...”

  How was it??