I didn't sleep that night.
Not because of nightmares—I had stopped having those centuries ago, when the horrors of waking life had exceeded anything my subconscious could conjure. No, I stayed awake because of what I had felt on the balcony.
Something dead. Something calling.
The sensation had faded, but not entirely. Even now, lying in my narrow bed and staring at that water stain shaped like a rabbit, I could feel a faint tug at the edges of my awareness. A pull, like gravity, but directed toward something I couldn't see.
At 3:47 AM, I gave up pretending to rest.
I sat cross-legged on my bedroom floor, back straight, hands resting on my knees. This was how I had trained for ten thousand years—not in comfort, but in stillness. The body was a tool. The mind was a weapon. Both needed to be honed.
I closed my eyes and reached inward.
The pool of dark energy was waiting for me. It had grown since yesterday—or perhaps I was simply becoming more attuned to its presence. It no longer felt like something foreign inside me, some parasitic force that had hitched a ride through time. Now it felt... natural. Like a muscle I had always possessed but never known how to flex.
I touched it, and it responded.
Cold spread through my limbs. Not the cold of winter or illness, but something deeper. Purer. The cold of the space between stars, of the moment before creation, of the silence that follows the last heartbeat.
The cold of death itself.
My eyes snapped open, and the world had changed.
I could see my bedroom in shades I had no names for. The cheap IKEA furniture glowed with residual heat from the day. The walls pulsed with faint electrical currents. And beyond—through the walls, through the floors, through the concrete and steel of the building—I could sense them.
Lives. Hundreds of them. Each one a beacon of warmth in my death-touched perception.
Kyle Henderson in 4B, sleeping restlessly, his heart laboring under decades of bad decisions. The elderly couple in 4A, their life forces dim but steady, entwined even in sleep. The young family on the second floor, three small flames clustered around two larger ones.
I could feel them all. Every heartbeat. Every breath. Every flicker of consciousness.
And I understood, with sudden terrible clarity, that I could feel them because I could take them.
The realization should have horrified me. Perhaps it would have, in my first life, when I still remembered what it meant to be fully human. But ten thousand years of survival had burned away the softer parts of my soul. I didn't recoil from this knowledge.
I catalogued it.
Death Aura, I thought, giving the power a name. Life sensing range: approximately 50 meters. Intensity correlates with proximity to death—the closer someone is to dying, the brighter they appear.
Kyle Henderson was very bright indeed. His heart would give out in less than a month, apocalypse or no apocalypse. The stress of the end times would simply accelerate the inevitable.
I filed that information away and pushed my senses further.
Beyond the building. Beyond the street. Into the city, where millions of lives burned like candles in the darkness—
And there.
That pull again. Stronger now that I was actively reaching for it.
Something dead. Or something dying.
I focused on it, trying to pinpoint the location. Two blocks away. Maybe three. An alley behind the old printing factory that had closed down last year.
My body was moving before my conscious mind had made a decision.
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The streets of Seattle were never truly empty, even at 4 AM. Delivery trucks rumbled past. Security guards made their rounds. The homeless huddled in doorways, their life forces dim with exhaustion and want.
I moved like a shadow, avoiding the pools of streetlight, trusting my new senses to warn me of approaching threats. The Death Aura—I was already thinking of it that way, capitalized, a proper name for a proper power—painted the world in shades of life and death that no human eye could perceive.
The printing factory loomed ahead, its windows dark, its loading bays sealed with rusted chains. Behind it, a narrow alley choked with garbage and forgotten machinery.
The pull was coming from there.
I slipped into the alley and let my senses guide me.
Halfway down, behind a dumpster that hadn't been emptied in months, I found the source.
It was a cat.
A stray, by the look of it—ribs visible through matted fur, one ear torn from some long-ago fight. It lay on its side in a pool of something dark, breathing in short, desperate gasps. A length of wire had wrapped around its hindquarters, cutting deep into the flesh. The wound was infected. The cat was dying.
I knelt beside it.
In my previous life, I would have ended its suffering quickly. A snap of the neck, a moment of mercy, and then I would have moved on. Death was common in the apocalypse. You learned not to dwell.
But my Death Aura had other ideas.
The moment I got close, the power inside me surged forward without my conscious command. It reached out toward the dying animal, drawn by the fading spark of life like a moth to flame.
No—not like a moth. Like a predator.
I watched, fascinated and horrified in equal measure, as tendrils of dark energy seeped from my fingers. They were visible to my altered perception, though I doubted any normal human could see them. Black threads, thin as spider silk, reaching toward the cat's failing body.
The cat's eyes—clouded with pain and infection—suddenly cleared. It looked up at me, and for a moment, I could have sworn I saw recognition in its gaze. Not human intelligence, but something simpler. Something primal.
Master, those eyes seemed to say. You came.
The tendrils touched the cat's body, and information flooded into my mind.
Status: Critical. Blood loss 40%. Systemic infection. Organ failure imminent. Time to death: 37 minutes.
The Death Aura wasn't just letting me sense this creature. It was analyzing it. Cataloguing its condition with the clinical precision of a medical scanner.
And then it showed me something else.
A choice.
I could feel the cat's life force guttering like a candle in a storm. The Death Aura wanted that energy—wanted to absorb it, to feed on it, to grow stronger from the consumption of a dying soul.
But there was another option.
I could give instead of take.
The realization hit me like a physical blow. I could feed my own energy into this creature. I could pull it back from the edge of death. I could—
Bond it.
The word rose unbidden from somewhere deep in my consciousness, carrying with it a weight of significance I didn't fully understand.
If I saved this creature—if I pulled it back from death with my own power—it would become mine. Not as a pet. Not as a servant. As something more fundamental. A piece of my domain. A soul bound to my will for as long as it existed.
I stared at the dying cat for a long moment.
Am I saving it—or enslaving it?
The question rose unbidden, and for the first time since waking in this timeline, I felt something like doubt. This wasn't mercy. This was dominion. I would be binding this creature's soul to my will, stripping away its freedom in exchange for continued existence.
What if this were Min-Tong?
The thought hit like a knife between my ribs. If I found her dying—if I arrived five minutes late again—would I do this to her? Bind her soul to mine, keep her walking at my side as something less than alive but more than dead?
Once I do this, there's no going back.
I knew that with certainty. This moment would define what I became. The first step on a path I could already see stretching into darkness.
In ten thousand years, I had never had a power like this. I had built my zombie armies through science and violence, through virus manipulation and behavioral conditioning. The undead followed me because I had learned to control the signals that governed their rotting brains.
But this... this was different. This was magic, or something close enough to make no difference. A fundamental ability to touch death itself and make it obey.
And if I could do this with a dying cat...
What could I do with a dying human?
The thought sent a chill down my spine that had nothing to do with my power. I had killed countless people over the millennia. Some deserved it. Some didn't. But I had never considered claiming their souls, binding them to my will beyond death.
This power changed everything.
The cat let out a weak mewl, pulling me back to the present moment. Its breathing had grown shallower. Thirty minutes to death. Maybe less.
I made my decision.
"Hold on," I whispered.
I reached into that pool of dark energy at my center and pushed.
It was nothing like I expected. I had braced myself for pain, for exhaustion, for the kind of soul-deep weariness that came from expending vital force. Instead, the energy flowed out of me like water finding its level—natural, effortless, even eager to move.
The black tendrils thickened, wrapping around the cat's body like a cocoon. Where they touched infected flesh, the corruption began to recede. Where they crossed the wire wound, the tissue started to knit. I could feel the animal's life force steadying, strengthening, pulling back from the brink.
And I could feel something else, too.
A connection forming. Thin at first, fragile as a newborn thought, but growing stronger with each passing second.
The cat's eyes found mine again, and this time there was no mistaking the intelligence behind them. Not human intelligence—something else. Something new.
Master.
The word didn't come through my ears. It came through the connection itself, a pulse of meaning that bypassed language entirely.
Yours.
The healing completed with a final surge of dark energy. The cat—no, not just a cat anymore—rose to its feet. Its movements were smooth, controlled, nothing like the desperate thrashing of a dying animal. Its fur was still matted, still marked by years of hard living, but there was something different in its eyes now.
Something that answered to me.
A wave of dizziness hit me without warning. I caught myself on the dumpster, vision swimming, as a sudden hollow hunger gnawed at my stomach. And for one disorienting moment, I felt her—the cat's pain, her fear, her desperate final moments—bleeding into my mind like an echo of trauma that wasn't mine.
This power has a cost.
I filed that away. Every system had costs. This one just extracted payment in flesh and feeling.
I held out my hand, and the cat rubbed against it, purring.
"You're the first," I said quietly. "The first soul bound to my domain."
The cat—I needed to give it a name—looked up at me and purred louder.
I had come into this alley expecting to find a dead thing that had been calling to my power. Instead, I had found something better. A test case. Proof that my abilities extended beyond mere sensing, beyond mere death-touch.
I could create.
I could bind the dying to my will and give them new purpose. And if I could do it with a cat...
Scout the alley exit, I sent through the bond. Silently.
Ghost moved before I finished the thought. She flowed across the grimy concrete like a shadow given form, utterly soundless, and paused at the alley's mouth to peer into the street. Through our connection, I saw what she saw: empty sidewalk, distant headlights, no threats.
Clear, came the response. Not words—just certainty.
The zombie apocalypse was coming in six days. Millions would die. Millions more would turn.
And every single one of them could be mine.
I smiled in the darkness, and the cat that was no longer quite a cat smiled with me.
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Dawn was breaking by the time I returned to my apartment, the newly-bound cat padding silently at my heels. I had named her Ghost—partly because of her gray-streaked fur, and partly because she moved with an eerie silence that even the most practiced hunter would envy.
Ghost was not a normal cat anymore.
Her wounds had healed completely, leaving not even scars. She moved with a fluid grace that exceeded anything her body should have been capable of. And when I reached through our connection, I could sense her in ways that transcended normal perception.
She was hungry—not for food, but for purpose. Her tiny soul yearned to serve, to prove herself worthy of the gift I had given her.
Later, I sent back through the bond. Rest now. Grow stronger.
Ghost settled onto the foot of my bed and closed her eyes, but I knew she wasn't sleeping. She was waiting, coiled like a spring, ready to move at my command.
I spent the remaining hours before work exploring our connection.
The bond was more than just communication. Through Ghost's eyes, I could see what she saw. Through her ears, I could hear what she heard. She was an extension of my will, a mobile sensor platform that answered to my thoughts.
And I understood, now, why my power had been drawn to her specifically.
She had been dying. That was the key. The Death Aura responded to approaching death, was drawn to it like a compass pointing north. The closer a creature was to dying, the stronger my connection to it would be.
In the apocalypse, there would be no shortage of the dying.
I pulled my attention back to my own body and checked the time. 7:30 AM. I needed to leave for work in fifteen minutes.
Another day of pretending to be normal. Another day of watching my coworkers worry about metrics and deadlines while the world counted down to oblivion.
But today would be different.
Today, I had taken the first step toward building something new.
I looked at Ghost, curled peacefully at the foot of my bed, and felt something I hadn't experienced in millennia.
Hope.
"Six days," I said aloud. "In six days, everything changes."
Ghost's eyes opened, two gleaming slits of golden light.
The bond pulsed. Not words—not yet—but fragments of meaning, raw and unformed, like a newborn mind learning to think:
Hunger... Purpose... Master... Ready.
She was still becoming. Still learning what she was now. The intelligence behind those eyes was growing with every passing moment, but her thoughts were still fractured, still assembling themselves from the chaos of her transformation.
That would change. In time, her responses would sharpen. Her mind would clarify. But for now, this fragmented awareness was proof of something even more valuable: she was evolving.
I watched her for a long moment, this creature that was mine now, body and soul. The dizziness had faded, but the memory of her pain still echoed faintly in my mind. A reminder that this power extracted payment.
This power feels borrowed, I thought suddenly. Like something lent, not given.
The thought unsettled me more than I wanted to admit. Whatever had pulled me back through time, whatever force had installed these abilities like a patch on corrupted code—it hadn't done so out of kindness. There would be a reckoning eventually.
But that was a problem for later.
For now, I had a more immediate question: If I could save a dying cat and bind it to my will...
What would happen when I reached someone I actually cared about dying?
Min-Tong.
Six days.
Until I stood over her dying body again.
Until I decided whether to let her go—or make her mine forever.