The interior of the mountain was warm.
That was the first thing I noticed. Not hot like fever. Warm like body temperature. Like I'd stepped inside something living and been wrapped in its heat.
The walls breathed. Actually breathed. Expanding and contracting in a rhythm that matched my heartbeat. Or maybe my heartbeat was matching the walls. At eighty-eight percent corruption, it was getting hard to tell where I ended and the Flesh Cradle began.
The passage sloped downward. Deeper into the mountain. Deeper into the Mother. The floor was soft beneath my boots—not wet stone like outside, but something organic. Each step sank slightly, leaving impressions that slowly filled in behind me like the mountain was healing my footprints.
Red bioluminescence pulsed through veins in the walls. Not the dim light we'd grown used to. Bright. Rhythmic. Like blood flowing through arteries. It cast everything in shades of crimson and shadow.
I could smell it. Copper and salt and something sweeter. The scent of a body from the inside. Of organs and blood and tissue that had never seen air.
My Essence Detection was going haywire. Signatures everywhere. Not individual creatures—just one massive presence that surrounded me on all sides. The Mother wasn't in the mountain. The mountain was the Mother. Every wall, every vein, every inch of breathing flesh.
I was walking through her body.
The passage opened into a chamber.
And I saw what my friends were fighting.
The chamber was vast. A cathedral of flesh. The ceiling rose a hundred feet overhead, supported by pillars of bone and sinew. The walls were covered in faces—hundreds of them, thousands—all embedded in the flesh. All with eyes closed. All serene.
Previous challengers. All the people who'd been assimilated. All the souls the Mother had collected.
And in the center of the chamber, suspended by cables of flesh and veins, hung a massive organ. Not a heart exactly. Something more. It pulsed with light and power, each beat sending ripples through the entire structure.
Lucy, Gery, and Somi stood before it. But they weren't attacking. They were defending.
Because the core was protected.
Arms burst from the floor around it. Not the massive limbs from outside. These were normal-sized. Human-sized. But there were hundreds of them. Thousands. A forest of reaching hands, all moving independently, all attacking simultaneously.
Lucy's lightning cut through dozens with each blast. The electricity jumped between arms, burning flesh, leaving the smell of cooked meat hanging in the air. But for every arm she destroyed, three more grew back.
Gery's katana flashed in precise arcs. The water-blade severed limbs cleanly, the cuts cauterized by the sharpness of the edge. He moved like liquid, flowing between attacks, never stopping. But he was bleeding from a dozen small wounds. The arms were too many. Too fast.
Somi directed them with her Strategic Omniscience. "Left flank in two seconds. High attack from above in four. Gery, defensive stance. Lucy, suppression fire pattern delta."
But even her Transcendent prediction ability wasn't enough. The arms adapted. Changed their patterns. Moved in ways that defied her calculations.
They were losing.
I stepped into the chamber. The arms sensed me immediately. A hundred hands turned in my direction.
"Sidd!" Lucy's voice held relief and fear in equal measure. "Your face—"
"I know," I interrupted. My voice was wrong. Three voices speaking at once—human, monster, corruption. "Focus on the core. I'll handle the arms."
I activated Essence Dominion.
The technique spread outward from my body like a wave. Not pulling essence toward me this time. Not pushing it away. Something different.
Erasure.
Every arm within my five-hundred-meter radius simply stopped existing. Not cut. Not burned. Not killed. Just removed from reality. Their essence dispersed into nothing, leaving empty space where flesh had been.
[ESSENCE DOMINION: ANNIHILATION FUNCTION]
[WARNING: TECHNIQUE UNSTABLE AT CURRENT CORRUPTION LEVEL]
[CORRUPTION LEVEL: 89%]
One percent from critical threshold. One percent from the point where the Mother could seize full control.
But the chamber was clear. The arms were gone. The path to the core was open.
"Now!" I commanded. "Destroy it now!"
Lucy and Gery moved as one. Lightning and water converging on the massive pulsing organ. The electricity burned. The blade cut. The core's surface cracked.
Black ichor poured from the wound. Not blood. Something thicker. Darker. It pooled on the floor, spreading outward, and where it touched the flesh walls, faces began to open their eyes.
"That's not good," Gery said.
He was right.
The faces embedded in the walls started screaming. All of them. Thousands of voices crying out in unison. Not pain. Not anger. Just awareness. The Mother's collected souls waking up.
And the chamber began to change.
The walls contracted. The ceiling lowered. The entire space was collapsing inward, trying to crush us.
"Tactical analysis!" Somi shouted over the screaming. "Chamber collapse rate: thirty seconds to critical compression. Recommend immediate core destruction and evacuation."
"Working on it!" Lucy's lightning intensified. The core cracked further. More ichor poured out.
But it was regenerating. The cracks sealed even as new ones formed. The Mother was healing faster than they could damage her.
"Sidd!" Lucy looked at me desperately. "Can you stop the regeneration?"
Could I? At eighty-nine percent corruption, my power was immense. My Essence Dominion could touch anything within five hundred meters. My Devourer attribute could consume nearly unlimited essence.
But using either would push me over ninety percent. Into critical territory. Into the zone where I'd lose myself completely.
I looked at the core. At the pulsing organ that was the Mother's heart and brain and soul all merged into one massive structure.
Then I looked at Lucy. At Gery. At Somi. My friends. My allies. The people who'd trusted me despite watching me transform into a monster.
The math was simple. Eighty-nine percent corrupted me trying to hold onto the last eleven percent of humanity, or ninety-plus percent corrupted me destroying the core and saving everyone.
I'd already made this choice. Back when I let the corruption spike past seventy. Back when I decided survival mattered more than staying human.
"Get clear of the core," I said quietly. "Get as far away as possible. This is going to be bad."
"Sidd, what are you—" Lucy started.
"MOVE!"
They moved. Ran to the chamber's edge. Put distance between themselves and the core.
I walked forward. Placed both hands directly on the pulsing organ. Felt the Mother's essence flowing through it. Felt the thousands of souls trapped inside. Felt the corruption that had consumed them all.
And I activated Devourer at maximum power.
The Mother's essence flooded into me like a tsunami.
Not a stream. Not a river. An ocean. Centuries of accumulated power. Thousands of consumed souls. The collected corruption of everyone who'd ever failed in the Flesh Cradle.
All of it pouring into me at once.
[ESSENCE CONSUMED: MOTHER OF LIMBS - PARTIAL]
[WARNING: ESSENCE OVERLOAD DETECTED]
[CORRUPTION LEVEL: 90%... 91%... 92%...]
The pain was indescribable. Not physical. Not spiritual. Both. Neither. Something beyond. Like my soul was being torn apart and rebuilt simultaneously.
My body transformed. Rapidly. Catastrophically.
The silver and black-red veins merged completely. Covered every inch of my skin. Glowed so bright they hurt to look at. My skin took on a metallic sheen—chrome-silver mixed with deep crimson.
The Mask of Hunger wasn't a mask anymore. It was my face. The bone-white surface was my skull. The devil horns weren't growing from my head—they were part of my head. When I tried to touch where the mask ended and my face began, there was no boundary. Just one continuous surface.
My hair turned pure silver. Not white anymore. Actual metallic silver. Each strand caught light like wire.
And my eyes. The void-black depths now had silver stars swirling in them. Like looking at deep space. At infinite darkness pierced by distant light.
[93%... 94%... 95%...]
I was losing myself. Could feel it happening. The human part—that eleven percent I'd been desperately clinging to—was burning away. Being consumed by the same hunger I was using to consume the Mother.
Memories faded. My parents' faces. My childhood. My name. My identity. All of it becoming abstract. Distant. Theoretical.
But I kept consuming. Kept pulling the Mother's essence into me. Because stopping meant failure. Stopping meant my friends died. Stopping meant everything we'd suffered was for nothing.
[96%... 97%...]
The core began to shrink. Collapse. The pulsing slowed. The light dimmed. I was killing it. Draining it dry.
But the cost was everything I was.
[98%...]
Two percent. Two percent of humanity left. Two percent of Sidd remaining in this body.
The Mother's voice echoed through my mind. Not angry. Not scared. Almost... proud.
"YES, MY FIRST CHILD. YES. CONSUME ME. TAKE MY POWER. BECOME ME. THIS IS WHAT I WANTED ALL ALONG."
I understood then. This was her plan. Not to kill us. Not to assimilate us into her mountain. To be consumed by someone strong enough to take everything she was and become something new.
She'd been cultivating me from the start. Pushing me toward this moment. This choice. This transformation.
I was becoming the new Mother of Limbs.
[99%...]
One percent. One percent human. Ninety-nine percent monster.
The core was almost dead. Almost drained. Just a little more.
But at ninety-nine percent, I would lose everything. Every memory. Every thought. Every piece of who I'd been. I would become pure corruption. Pure hunger. Pure transformation.
I would become the thing we'd been fighting.
My hand started to pull away. Some deep instinct—that last one percent screaming to stop, to hold onto something, to not cross the final threshold.
Then I heard Lucy's voice. Small. Scared. But trying to be brave.
"Sidd. It's okay. Finish it. We'll... we'll figure out what comes after. Together. Just finish it."
Together.
That word. That stupid, human, irrational word.
I didn't understand it anymore. At ninety-nine percent corruption, I barely understood language. Barely understood anything beyond hunger and essence and power.
But somewhere in that remaining one percent, something responded to the word. Something recognized it. Something held onto it like a drowning man holds onto driftwood.
I consumed the last of the core.
[100%]
The world stopped.
Not metaphorically. Actually stopped. Time froze. The collapsing chamber hung motionless. The screaming faces fell silent mid-cry. Lucy, Gery, and Somi were statues.
And I stood alone in stillness.
A notification appeared. Not from the Anchor Point system. From something else. Something deeper.
[CORRUPTION LEVEL: 100%]
[TRANSFORMATION COMPLETE]
[HUMANITY: 0%]
[YOU ARE NO LONGER HUMAN]
[YOU ARE NO LONGER SIDD]
[YOU ARE—]
The notification paused. Flickered. Like the system itself was confused.
[ERROR: SUBJECT RETAINS PARTIAL AWARENESS]
[ERROR: SUBJECT DISPLAYS IMPOSSIBLE RESISTANCE]
[ERROR: ONE PERCENT PARADOX DETECTED]
[RECALCULATING...]
[CORRUPTION LEVEL: 100%]
[HUMANITY: 0%]
[PARADOX: 1%]
[CLASSIFICATION: UNKNOWN]
[TRUE NAME EVOLUTION DETECTED]
[THE LOST ONE → THE FOUND NOTHING]
[YOU HAVE ACHIEVED IMPOSSIBLE BALANCE]
[YOU ARE FULLY CORRUPTED AND FULLY HUMAN SIMULTANEOUSLY]
[YOU ARE EVERYTHING AND NOTHING]
[YOU ARE—]
Time resumed.
The chamber finished collapsing. The core was dead. The Mother's essence was gone—absorbed into me.
And I stood there, at one hundred percent corruption with one percent paradox, and I smiled.
Because I understood now. You couldn't be lost if you never had a destination. You couldn't lose yourself if there was no self to lose. You couldn't become a monster if you'd always been one underneath.
The question "Am I Lost" had finally been answered.
No. Because the Lost One had found exactly what he was looking for.
Nothing.