PD.2.16 (Patreon)

The black entrance stood ahead of him.

Ouz took one more step toward it, and his knees buckled. He hit the stone hard enough to feel it through what little strength he had left. His sword clattered from his hand and skidded a short distance across the ground. For a second he stayed where he was, one palm on the floor, breath stuck halfway in his chest.

The strength was gone. Not all of it, but enough of it had drained away to leave his arms trembling and his back feeling hollow. The strange force that had filled him moments ago had vanished so fast that his body still felt wrong without it. Heat was gone. Pressure was gone. The sense that he could cut through anything in front of him was gone. A dull weight settled behind his eyes.

He forced himself upright into a seated position and looked down at himself first. Blood still stained his clothes, but the worst of the damage was already knitting shut. He was still here. Still breathing.

A faint flicker crossed his vision. Ouz froze as a line of pale text appeared in the air before him.

[System upgrade complete.]

He stared. The words stayed. They did not vanish the way the others always had. Another line formed beneath the first.

[Manual interface access unlocked.]

Ouz did not blink. Whatever this thing was, it had changed. He stayed still for several breaths. He had seen words before, a few at a time, brief things that flashed into existence and disappeared before he could do more than catch pieces of them. Skill acquired. Error. Capacity limit exceeded. This did not vanish.

A thin square outline spread through the air in front of him. More lines unfolded inside it, clean and pale and cold. His fingers twitched toward his sword before he stopped himself. It had never touched him before. It had never stayed. The thing resembled a carved tablet more than anything he knew, only this one was made of cold light instead of stone.

He lifted one hand and pushed it toward the floating lines. His fingers passed through the light and nothing happened. Frowning, he tried again, slower this time. His hand moved through the edge of the thing. The tablet rippled. One section brightened.

Ouz went still. He pushed his hand forward once more and felt no resistance. The light shifted again. So that was how it worked. Not touch. Intent. He looked at the first lines again.

[System upgrade complete.]

[Manual interface access unlocked.]

Under them sat a list. He focused on the first entry. The tablet changed.

[Practicing Death]

[A core death-bound function. Upon defeat, existence rewinds to the nearest valid return point.]

Ouz stared at the words until they blurred. He knew the name. The system had shown him that much before. But never like this. Never with the truth sitting beneath it in plain view. He read the description again.

[Upon defeat, existence rewinds to the nearest valid return point.]

A slow breath left him through his nose. So the thing had known all along. It had known what it was doing to him every time it dragged him back. He looked away from the line for a moment and toward the dark entrance ahead. He could still remember the taste of blood from earlier deaths, the impact, the pain, the confusion that came in the first loops before he understood what was happening.

Upon defeat. Not death. Defeat. His eyes narrowed. He could fall. He could break. But death would never be the end of him. He turned back to the tablet and moved to the next entries.

[Dead Cold (Novice)]

[Hardens the body against cold. Reduces the physical toll of low temperatures and improves resistance to freezing conditions.]

That one made sense. He moved on.

[Dead Step (Novice)]

[Move with less sound and waste less motion. Improves stealth, footing, and short bursts of controlled speed.]

That one fit too. Until now, he had thought it was only for moving quietly. The fight from moments ago said otherwise. He remembered black smoke trailing him, his body cutting across the battlefield in sudden bursts, men losing track of him until he was already close. Another.

[Dead Calm (Novice)]

[Suppresses panic and dulls pain. Increases composure under stress and raises tolerance to physical suffering.]

His mouth tightened. Dulling pain, he could believe. He had suspected that much already. The rest of the line dug deeper. Suppressing panic. Holding him steady under stress. That explained more than he liked.

He kept reading.

[Death’s Trajectory (Novice)]

[Trace the cleanest path to a target. Improves accuracy by revealing strike lines, impact angles, and efficient attack routes.]

He had felt that one in battle. There were times when an opening did not appear with the eye first. It appeared somewhere deeper. A line. A certainty. Move here. Cut there. Step now.

He moved lower.

[Death’s Awareness (Adept)]

[Heightens all senses through focused awareness. Improves perception during active use and sharpens instinctive response when danger draws near.]

Adept. That word shouldn’t have surprised him. The system had already shown him that much. What caught him off guard was the proof of it. He paused and scanned back up. Novice. Novice. Novice. Novice. His gaze dropped to Awareness again. Adept. That fit. More than the others, that was the one he had leaned on. The one that had saved him too many times to count.

He kept going.

[Death’s Perseverance]

[A core survival function. Stabilizes return mechanics, restores blocked pathways, and fortifies resolve against collapse.]

Ouz read it twice.

Return mechanics. Blocked pathways. He did not understand all of it. He understood enough. He remembered acquiring this skill only after watching the First Passage through to the end. The system had warned him before that something essential was missing. First Passage cannot be found. Additional skills locked until First Passage is recovered. This, whatever it truly was, seemed to be the part that kept the whole structure running while pieces of it remained sealed.

He moved lower.

[Swordsmanship (Adept)]

[Improves control, precision, and efficiency in blade use. Increases the effectiveness of fundamental sword techniques.]

His eyes stopped there. Adept. It had not been that before. He knew it with the same certainty he knew the weight of his own sword. Before the fight it had been lower. Novice. Now it said Adept. Ouz stared at the word for a while and felt a small piece of the last battle settle into place. Not all of that strength had been a lie. Not all of it had vanished. One thing had remained.

He moved on. The next three entries sat together. The new ones. He focused on the first.

[Death’s Harvest]

[Absorb death-aligned energy from the fallen. Cannot exceed current vessel capacity.]

Ouz looked at it for a long moment.

That explained the pull. The flood. The force that had entered him through the dead woman’s attack and the corpses around him. It explained why the energy had not torn him apart at once. Absorb death-aligned energy from the fallen. His gaze dropped to the second line. Cannot exceed current vessel capacity. So there was the limit.

His face hardened. No endless growth. No killing a field full of men and walking away with enough power to flatten an army. Whatever he had absorbed would stop at the edge of what his body could hold.

He remembered the text from earlier. Capacity limit exceeded. Excessive energy dividing. Overload detected. The woman had forced more into him anyway. A bypass. A one-time breach. That meant Harvest was real. It also meant the thing that had happened in the fight could not become his answer to everything. Easy power had a price.

He moved to the next entry.

[Death’s Call]

[Command and reshape the dead through a proper medium. Enables reanimation, corpse grafting, and necromantic construction. Requires a compatible catalyst.]

Ouz’s eyes narrowed. He read it again. Reanimation. Corpse grafting. Necromantic construction. His gaze moved past the tablet and back to the dead outside. The woman rose in his mind at once, the bell in her hand, the bone flute, the corpses jerking into motion at her call.

A proper medium. A compatible catalyst. That was the answer. Not just power. A tool. The bell. The flute. Something like them.

He clicked his tongue once under his breath. So the skill existed, but that did not mean he could use it. He had no catalyst. No proper medium. No idea how to command anything. Even if he found a corpse right now, he would not know the first step. The tablet might as well have said locked.

His focus shifted to the last of the three.

[Dead Black Flame]

[Manifest cold black flame. Especially effective against the dead. Spreads through death-aligned targets and burns without heat.]

Ouz looked at his right hand. Nothing. No black fire. No hint of it. He flexed his fingers once. Pain answered from the knuckles. Weakness pulled through the wrist. He looked back to the skill.

[Manifest cold black flame.]

He had done it. He knew he had. He had seen the corpses burn. He had watched the dead drop and stay down. He had felt the black fire move through them like hunger given shape. His gaze returned to his empty hand.

Nothing.

He tried to will it into being.

Nothing.

Again.

Nothing.

He exhaled through his nose and let the attempt go. So that was another trick of the overload. He had used it because the system had needed somewhere to throw the excess. The skill remained on the list, but his hand gave him nothing. Three new skills. Three doors. All closed. Ouz leaned back a little and looked over the list once more. His eyes caught on something lower down. Another heading. He focused on it.

[Iye’s Tín]

[An anomalous resonance linked to spirit, age, and worldly life. Converts existence into strength and deepens through harmony.]

He went still again. Spirit, age, worldly life. Converts existence into strength. Existence. Not a blessing from the Blue Sky. Not qut. Not blood. Not some hidden current in the world. He read it a second time and hated how much sense it made.

Spirit. Age. Worldly life. The words dragged old facts into place. Years lost. Years lived. The body changing before it should. The way each loop added something to him that ordinary training alone could not explain.

His gaze moved lower.

[Tín Resonance]

[Reflects the current intensity and harmony of Tín within the body. Higher resonance enhances physical function, recovery, and skill performance. Unbalanced resonance reduces efficiency within the current state and increases internal strain.]

Beneath it were more lines.

[Intensity: Low / Steady / High]

[Resonance State: Unbalanced / Balanced]

[Tín Reserve: 20 / 20 Years]

[Vessel Capacity: 20 Years]

[Tín Resonance: Steady (Unbalanced)]

Ouz stared at the numbers. Twenty. He knew that number should have been lower. Before the fight. Before the flood. Before the dead woman forced all that power into him. It had not been twenty. Now it was. Reserve matched capacity.

His gaze moved back to the intensity line. Low. Steady. High. He had seen Steady before. That much was familiar. What was not familiar was High. Until now, he had thought Steady was the end of it. High. Never. Not once. His eyes shifted to the state. Unbalanced.

That word sat badly with him. He had reached balanced before. He knew it without knowing how. There had been times when movement felt cleaner, his body lighter, his mind clearer. Less drag. Less resistance. Now, after all that power, it sat on Unbalanced. So more did not mean better. Too much force in the wrong state only strained the vessel harder.

He kept reading. Another section opened.

[Vessel Conditioning Protocol]

[-Running: 5 km-]

[-Squats: 100-]

[-Push-ups: 100-]

Ouz stared at the list. He looked at it again. That was it. After all the death. All the blood. All the loops. After all the cold lines about existence, resonance, and necromantic construction, the thing wanted him to run five kilometers and do squats. A short breath left him. Not quite a laugh. He looked lower.

[Daily Conditioning]

[Complete assigned physical disciplines to strengthen the vessel. Repeated completion contributes to long-term capacity growth.]

[Failure Penalty]

[Missed conditioning halts growth progress and increases the risk of unstable resonance.]

That part wiped away the last trace of humor. Capacity growth. There it was.

It would not be handed to him. It would not be something he could keep stealing from corpses forever. It had to be built through the body. His eyes shifted back to the reserve and capacity lines. Twenty out of twenty. Full. A hard cap for now. If he wanted more, he had to make the vessel able to hold more.

The dead woman had shoved extra force into him and the system had nearly torn itself apart trying to process it. That was what the earlier madness had been. Not some grand awakening. A structure getting forced past its safe limit.

He sat in silence for a while after that, staring at the tablet and fitting old experiences into new words. Practicing Death explained the loop. Perseverance explained why the loop had held. Awareness. Trajectory. Calm. Step. Cold. Those explained pieces of him that had once felt half instinct and half miracle.

Harvest, Call, Black Flame explained the fight. They also explained that he had less in hand than it first seemed. Swordsmanship had risen. That one was real. Everything else came with a wall attached. He looked once more at his current resonance. Steady. Unbalanced.

Maybe High was possible. Maybe Balanced at High was possible. Maybe that was what he had brushed against in the fight and failed to hold. Or maybe High needed something he still lacked. More control. A stronger vessel. More lived time. He did not know. Not yet.

The tablet remained before him, quiet and waiting. No voice came from it. No answer. No guidance. Just lines. Ouz focused on the edge of the tablet and pushed at it with intent. The tablet dimmed. He pushed again. It folded in on itself and vanished. The darkness before him remained. The weight in his body remained. The knowledge remained. That was enough.

He planted one hand on the ground and rose. His legs shook once. He waited until the weakness passed enough for movement. He retrieved his sword and turned it once in his grip. The weapon still felt familiar. Better than before, even through the ache in his arm. Adept. He could feel that much.

He lifted his head and looked at the black entrance of the stone structure ahead. Four sloping sides rising to a point. He had never seen such a thing before.

The opening waited in silence. Ouz drew one slow breath and started forward again. This time, when he reached the threshold, he did not stop. A stale breath of air drifted out from the dark beyond.

He stepped into the dark.