I could feel myself approaching the surface. Though the grey rock had been vile, it left me invigorated and buzzing with energy. My steps quickened. I sprinted up the last stretch of the stairs, rushing through total darkness, so fast I almost smashed my head against the ceiling.
I skidded to a halt.
The chute’s ceiling was two great metal doors that sat at the top of the staircase and sealed off the chute — and me — from the outside world.
My stomach growled as I pushed at the doors. Surely, at any moment, the formation in the doors would activate and release me from this prison.
Unfortunately, the doors in the ceiling remained sealed no matter how much I pushed. Frustrated, I punched the metal, but there wasn’t even a sound besides the crunching of my fists. After my hands healed, I tried prying the doors open. The very tips of my fingers fit in the groove between the doors, and I pulled with all my might. Eventually, my shoulder gave out with a pop, but the door remained where it was.
Frustrated, I punched the door again and walked back down the stairs, cradling my freshly broken wrist. I walked back down to the slightly open iron door sitting halfway down the chute. Though the door was ajar, I sat on a step outside the door and waited for my wrist and shoulder to heal completely before entering.
Even though I was hungry, it was better to be safe than sorry.
I walked into the room and immediately stopped.
It was much larger than the laboratory below, or even the hall of cells. The vast chamber must have once been sterile, but now roots drooped from the ceiling and a mustiness filled the air. Cracks spread out from the growths, and this disruption broke the light formation.
Despite the failure of qi-powered light, the room was not entrenched in darkness.
Eight huge tubes of glass stood scattered throughout the room. They were filled with a green liquid that lit the space in shades of emerald, and a creature floated inside each one.
I’d never seen anything like them.
I walked closer, transfixed by curiosity, and couldn’t figure out what it was.
Once, when I was a child in the northern spring, my father took me to a circus camped outside the small village where he was purchasing pickled fish. In a row of mysterious multi-colored tents, one flamboyant circus worker charged me an entire week’s allowance to enter a secluded room where a heavy glass jar sat on the plinth.
Inside his jar floated a strange animal with six hooved limbs sprouting from a bulbous body, and two heads with wide black eyes filmed by death.
My memories from the farm told me that the jar held conjoined calves. Our neighbors had one once after an ill-omened storm blew through the grasslands —
I closed my eyes as a spike of pain flared through my mind.
My breathing steadied as I counted backwards, until I could dismiss the pain from my clashing memories.
When I opened my eyes, I was face-to-face with the creature floating in the tube.
It might resemble the conjoined cow foetus, but it was human, and it was alive. All eight of the glowing tubes held a similar creature. Their eyes tracked me as I walked between them.
“Can you hear me?” I asked. “I’m looking for a way to open the exit hatch.”
They watched me, some with wide gaping jaws that couldn’t possibly close, others flapping their lips like fish, but neither made any sense. Some of them were larger than me, some had multiple heads, and all looked twisted. Their long black hair floated like pondweed around pale skin painted green by the fluid.
“So you lot just float all day?” I asked. “Must be nice.”
One of them rapped at the glass, a small plinking noise, but I couldn’t tell if it was mindless or not.
A complicated formation on the ground connected the tubes to a series of interlocking stone altars. I walked around the odd shrines, not knowing what the carved designs meant, and made my way over to the only broken tube in the room.
The cause of damage was obvious. A root burst through the ceiling above, and the resulting rockfall crushed the tube and killed the creature that once floated inside. Rocks pinned the corpse’s legs, while glass shards stabbed up from the underside.
I couldn’t tell how long ago the accident happened, but the corpse was as withered as the dusty herbs I saw in the laboratory below.
Only a stain on the stone floor showed where the green fluid once pooled. Deep claw marks in the ground marked where the creature tried to dig itself out.
“Poor fucker,” I said. “Nobody deserves that.”
The tube creatures and I shared a moment of silence for our fallen fellow test subject. After that, I knelt down.
I couldn’t help it.
My mouth salivated.
I’d been so hungry since I woke up, and finally, I was confronted with something that my senses screamed at me was food. Ignoring my instincts was not an option.
Flesh tore from the thin bones like wind-dried sausage.
I chewed and drooled, lips smacking as I pulled handfuls of the corpse’s flesh into my mouth faster than I could swallow. My stomach squirmed with need.
A week without eating, and now I ate a week’s fill.
The taste wasn’t like anything I remembered — though I only had a few true memories of eating meat to compare it to: my street rat and farmer lives had been almost exclusively vegetarian, while the merchant’s son never ate anything without rich sauces.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
My mouth filled with an acidic taste, leathery, salty, impossible to resist, with a savory note I recognised as the smell that first woke me in my cell.
I ate all the meat except for what was trapped under the rocks. I also left the creature’s head. By the time I was done with the body, my hunger was satiated, and something about eating a face didn’t sit right with me — especially if I wasn’t hungry.
The floating creatures watched in silence the whole time. I’d ignored them while eating, but suddenly I felt self-conscious.
“It’s my way of honoring the dead,” I said with a sheepish smile, but they didn’t respond.
Wiping at my chin, I stood, but paused when the corpse's head shook. It turned to look at me, and I raised an eyebrow.
The dead face and I stared at each other for a moment. It shook, while I remained still, and eventually the dried flesh crumbled as small grey rock shivered its way out of the skull and onto the ground beside my foot.
Hmmm.
The family resemblance was clear.
“Are you going to treat me like your sister?”
The stone trembled, and with a sigh, I sat down on the ground. This time, when I picked up the rock, I had less distance to fall.
###
Suspended inside a green tube, my body twisted in on itself as I floated and watched masked cultivators pacing through the room, mixing herbs in their cauldrons and dropping gleaming pills into the altars, where some unknowable process transferred the medicine directly into my tank. We knew each other, us subjects, tapping the glass and sending vibrations through the tubes to each other, speaking without words as we floated through time…
###
I came to lying on the floor, that sour taste even stronger in my mouth, and the test subjects all rapping the glass.
This time, I knew what they wanted, and I walked over to the altars.
“Alright, alright,” I said through my headache.
I’d never seen anything like this room before, but the secondhand memories from the stone told me what I was looking at. The altars weren’t just connected to the formation in the ground; they provided a means to regulate conditions inside the tubes, such as whether or not they were open.
“Don’t worry, friends. I’ll let you out, and we can all go free together.”
I activated the altars, following the exact sequence of actions I remembered the cultivators using in my stolen memories. Part of me wondered how exactly I was gaining memories from the small rocks — and who exactly had been standing on the mountaintop to watch the first falling spire — but I was much more focused on escaping the facility.
I downplayed it earlier, but my claustrophobia was really growing on me.
The thought of being trapped underground while unable to die really sounded like a nightmare.
Hopefully, one of these creatures would know how to open the doors at the top of the staircase. I’d been too late to free the prisoners downstairs, but I wouldn’t let these guys rot — or pickle, I suppose.
After finishing the sequence of actions, I stepped back and waited.
Nothing happened.
With a frown, I repeated the actions, following the steps exactly as they came from the memory. One creature tapped on the glass.
“I remember the sequence,” I said, a little testily as my anxiety rose. “They must be broken or something.”
The others tapped the glass, and I listened.
“What do you mean?”
They tapped.
“I suppose that makes sense,” I said as I inspected my hands. “But shouldn’t I have some qi?”
Once more, I looked inside myself — or tried to. Really, I just stood there with my eyes closed and focused on my breathing and felt like an idiot.
All kids play cultivator, but there’s a point where you grow up and, suddenly, pretending to have supernatural abilities feels childish.
Still, I probed inside my body for my dantian or meridians, trying to find some trace of qi…
Everyone was supposed to have these! Even if they weren’t a cultivator, the components should be there. But when I tried to detect them…
There really was nothing.
I sighed.
“Alright,” I said. “Plan B.”
Time to break some glass!
I’m not an idiot.
I knew that the glass would be too tough for my fists to break, even a rudimentary examination of the shards on the ground revealed that much. Fortunately, they also revealed the weakness.
Big rocks.
The pieces of the collapsed ceiling had enough weight to break the glass. I just needed to pick up a big rock and hurl it at the glass. If I could do that enough times, I would be able to break through. There was a rock the size of a watermelon that I dragged over to the nearest test tube.
The creature floating inside seemed to be a mother with her children growing out of her back. Her children had long flowing hair, but their eyes were peacefully asleep. The mother watched me with black eyes larger than a gaping mouth.
Through a series of taps on the glass and gestures, I told her my plan, and she backed up to the far edge of the tube. It was gratifying to communicate with normal people again. Drippy had been far too sarcastic.
I hefted the rock up onto my shoulder, took a couple of steps back, and then charged forward. My momentum hurled the rock at the tube. It flew a couple of feet before smacking into the glass with a duller thud than I expected.
The rock scuffed the glass and tumbled back to the ground. I jumped out of the way as it rolled past my feet. The mother rapped the glass encouragingly, and I lifted the rock back up to try again.
The weight wasn’t so much that I couldn’t carry it, but hurling something heavy like that was harder than I expected. The three sets of memories showed various levels of fitness, with the farmer being the sturdiest, and I remembered bags of grain that would weigh this much, but we always put them on a donkey.
It was amazing I could throw it at all, but my body felt different since my flesh regenerated over my bones. Moving felt far more deliberate now. I wasn’t just walking; I was moving my bones, and the flesh wrapped around those bones, while my blood surged inside, pumping the muscles and propelling the whole contraption.
I was liable to fall over if I thought about it too much, so I concentrated on hurling the rock as hard as possible.
After a few more efforts that resulted in little more than a scratch, I stepped back from the problem.
Plan B wasn’t working.
What could I do for Plan C?
The altars looked less durable than the glass. If I smashed those, it might release the tanks. Though I didn’t need the tapping of the floating creature people to relegate that idea to Plan D.
So, Plan C.
Maybe…
If I could manipulate the blood on the outside of my body, then could I manipulate it while it was still inside? If I could make my blood pump faster and fill my muscles, I could throw harder.
In theory.
I tried to recreate the strange tingling sensation associated with controlling the blood. It took me a few moments, and I needed to close my eyes before I could truly feel the blood moving through my veins.
It was very strange, like dipping my fingers into a stream, except I was both the stream and the fingers.
With a bit of concentration, I increased the speed. My heart beat faster to keep up with the flow. I was a little nervous about messing with my heart, but after coming back to life from being a charred skeleton, I decided it was worth the risk.
My blood raced, surging through my body like a separate being, and my muscles swelled.
I trembled with strength.
Bending my knees, I picked up the rock. It was much easier now, as though it only weighed half as much. With the rock held firmly in both hands, I spun around in a circle and launched it straight at the glass tube.
The rock struck the middle of the tube and sent a spiderweb of fractures through the glass. Even after the rock tumbled to the ground, the glass continued cracking.
Success!
