"They say fire implies an end, but ash implies a memory.
To be forged anew, one must first be reduced to ash."
Rhys gasped for air, an agonized sound that broke the silence of the crypt.
There were no lights at the end of the tunnel or divine judgments. In one instant, he was being disintegrated by antimatter in a desert of ash, and the next, he was freezing, lying on cold stone and soaked in clotted blood.
His eyes snapped open.
His body reacted on combat instinct. He tried to sit up, reaching for the detonator, looking for the Golden Scorpion, but his muscles didn't respond. A dead weight was crushing him against the ground.
"Get off..." he tried to say, but only a gurgle came from his throat.
Rhys gritted his teeth and pushed whatever was on top of him. A corpse rolled to the side with a dull thud. It was a young man, wearing cheap leather armor shredded by claws. His glassy eyes stared at nothing.
Rhys analyzed the situation while stabilizing his breathing. The air here stank. It smelled of acid, entrails, and stale dampness.
He looked around. He was in a wide cavern of dark gray stone. The only light came from blue bioluminescent fungi on the ceiling and a fallen torch sputtering a few meters away, about to go out.
And he wasn't alone. Dozens of bodies covered the floor. Men and women, dressed in rags and patched armor, massacred. Severed limbs, torn open torsos... whatever had attacked them had shown no mercy.
Rhys looked at his hands. He stopped. Those weren't his hands. They were longer and thinner. The calluses from years of handling rifles and explosives were gone, replaced by slender, pale fingers stained with soot.
He brought his hand to his chest, expecting to feel the scar from the Golden Spear. There was no such wound. Instead, he sought the source of the sharp pain he felt. His fingers sank into an open, wet wound just below his ribs. Someone, or something, had stabbed this body with a serrated blade.
He should be dead. In fact, judging by the coldness of the skin, this body had already died minutes ago.
But the heart was beating. Slow, painful, but beating.
Suddenly, neon blue text superimposed itself over his vision, floating in the cavern air like a persistent hallucination.
[Synchronization Complete.]
[New Vessel: Assigned.]
[Host Status: Critical (Fatal wound to liver and left lung).]
[Activating Passive Trait:
Rhys observed the lights and the blue text. They seemed familiar, identical to the interfaces generated by neural chips in Vorakh. He quickly felt the spots where these chips were usually implanted: the nape of the neck, behind the ears. He found nothing. The skin was smooth.
"Strange," he thought. "I'll look for it calmly later. Maybe it's subcutaneous nanotechnology."
A burning in the wound demanded his immediate attention. It wasn't pain, but a sensation of intense tingling. He looked down and saw the flesh around the hole in his stomach begin to smoke, slowly knitting itself together with gray threads, forcibly closing the hemorrhage.
"I imagine this is the 'Will of the Ash'. At least this body isn't entirely useless if it has integrated auto-repair."
Rhys tried to stand. He leaned against the cold stone wall, panting as the skill finished its work. The wound in his abdomen closed, but the skin did not regain its natural color. Instead, a grayish, rough mark remained, similar to compacted ash or pumice stone. The sharp pain vanished, replaced by a cold, hungry void in his stomach.
Seeing the strange scarring, he narrowed his eyes, focusing. His pupils dilated, and the physical world decomposed into fine strands of information. He saw the tissues knitting together, assisted by an unknown grayish energy acting like cellular glue.
His gift. Passive Analytical Vision. It was still there. His ability to see the structure of reality had traveled with him.
"Damage report," he muttered to himself. If this body had a Tactical AI implant, it should respond to voice commands.
But it didn't. Absolute silence in his head.
"What a useless AI," Rhys thought with disdain. "When I find the chip, I'll reprogram it to be actually intelligent."
He continued examining his body. This vessel was pitiful. Arms thin from malnutrition, clothes that were nothing more than burlap rags and old leather. Whoever this boy had been, he wasn't a soldier. He was a worker, or perhaps a slave.
The torch on the ground gave a final sputter, threatening to leave him in absolute darkness at any moment. Rhys knew that, in an unknown place, being without light was a death sentence.
He approached the burning torch, picked it up, and grabbed two unlit ones he found along the way to use as spares.
As he examined the surroundings, another screen flickered and manifested in front of him.
[IMPORTANT MISSION]
[OBJECTIVE: Survive until you find a safe place.]
[REWARD: A well-deserved rest to renew your body.]
Rhys swiped the text away with a dismissive wave of his hand, as if it were smoke. He didn't need a defective AI to understand that he had to survive.
He had already formed a plan in his head. First: find a weapon.
He knelt beside the corpse of the boy who had covered him. He searched his pockets with professional speed. Nothing. Just a piece of hard, moldy bread. Rhys stored it in a tattered backpack he had picked up from the ground; hunger would come soon, and he couldn't afford to be picky.
He moved to the next body, a burly man with a shattered chest. His limp hand rested near a tool. Rhys took it. It was a mining pickaxe. The wood of the handle was splintered and the metal rusted, but it had a spiked side and a hammer side. It was too heavy for his current arms. "This will do for breaking doors or skulls." He hung it on his belt.
He kept searching. Near the corpse of a woman, he found something much better: a rapier. The blade was thin, designed for fast, precise thrusts. This was much more suitable for his current physical qualities than a brute force weapon. He lifted it, testing the balance.
"It will do."
He continued looting the place with efficiency, taking two small knives and what appeared to be a crumpled letter in the fist of one of the dead. Rhys smoothed the paper, hoping to find a map or coordinates. But there was a big problem.
His eyes scanned the symbols traced in the dried ink. It wasn't the language of Vorakh. Nor was it similar to the languages of the civilizations he knew.
Rhys looked up into the darkness of the cavern.
"Where the hell am I?"
Rhys had a theory, a quick hypothesis based on the scant data he had. When his physical body was destroyed, his consciousness must have been assimilated by the Golden Vortex. If killing the Scorpions was the first phase, this "Mission" the AI had just executed must be the second trial. Or perhaps an advanced combat simulation. It was the only logical explanation for the gamified structure of reality he was perceiving.
"If this is an immersive simulation, then it must respond to root commands," he thought.
"Status," he ordered firmly.
Responding to his voice, a window unfolded in front of him once again. What he saw fascinated him; his scientific curiosity was instantly piqued.