At once, the tome's pages fluttered. Red mist bled from between the leather binding. It coiled downward, slowly at first, then thickened, inching toward his face. Caldreth recoiled, but the mist held him in place as it washed over him, seeping into his skin and sliding into his eyes, nose, and mouth.

  It was like breathing in old iron. The mist hooked into his nerves, causing Caldreth's vision to go white as a violent surge of information assaulted his brain, stitching Sanguimancy into his gray matter with a white-hot needle.

  The agony lasted only a heartbeat.

  For an instant, the cavern vanished. Streams of crimson flowed past in layered currents. Among them crawled black threads, clotted and wrong, writhing like worms. Through the lingering sting in his skull, the tome's will wrapped around his thoughts, guiding his focus.

  Here. Separate.

  Within the flow, the corruption clung like a parasite. Caldreth pulled, and the two came apart.

  Krim raised an eyebrow. "Well?"

  Caldreth flexed his fingers. The burning in his mind began to fade, replaced by a strange, precise awareness.

  He rubbed his temples. "That was extremely unpleasant. But it showed me the path."

  Caldreth moved to a different corpse, dropping to a knee. The ichor pooled thick around it, black-green and reeking. He placed his left hand over the demon's chest.

  This time, he listened.

  Rot surged first, flooding his senses with a smell like burning marrow. Beneath it, deep in the chest cavity, something else pulsed. Faint. Stubborn. He reached for it. The corruption snarled at his touch, coiling around the clean thread like a fist, trying to pull him down into the sludge with it. He gritted his teeth and pulled harder. The thread slid free, warm and untainted, trailing upward through his palm in a thin ribbon of garnet.

  The first body surrendered its yield.

  "Hm," Krim said from behind him, his voice stripped of its usual sharpness. He didn't offer more. Just watched.

  The second resisted. Caldreth pushed past the resistance, found the pulse, and pried it loose. The effort cost him something deeper than muscle, a tightness behind his eyes, a faint ringing in his skull. The third came faster, but left him breathing through his teeth.

  He moved to the fourth.

  The corruption here was worse, layered thick over anything living. He reached for the buried pulse and found nothing. He pushed deeper. The blackness surged up his wrist like cold water, and his vision greyed at the edges. He clenched his jaw until it hurt, forcing his will further down.

  A single thread emerged. Thin as a hair. Weak as dying embers.

  It wriggled free, climbed halfway up his wrist, and went out.

  The tome vibrated with a brief, hollow hum.

  Mockery.

  Caldreth looked up at it, his jaw tight. "I am learning."

  Krim crouched a few paces away, elbows on his knees. He said nothing. That was more unsettling than commentary.

  Caldreth turned back to the corpse and started again.

  By the fifth body, his hands had begun to shake. He didn't acknowledge it. He pressed his palm flat against the cold chest and hunted for the beat, found it buried under a knot of corruption thicker than the others, and tore it free through sheer, grinding repetition of will. The thread came loose in pieces, the last of it flickering like a candle in a draft.

  The sixth nearly broke him.

  He knelt over it and felt nothing. No pulse. No thread. Just dead, blighted meat. He stayed there longer than he should have, his breath coming shallow and fast, aware that Krim had stopped moving behind him. The tome drifted lower, hovering at his shoulder, its warmth pressing against his ear like a brand.

  Press.

  He pressed.

  Something buried very deep surrendered with a wet, reluctant give, as though the blood had been holding its breath for centuries. Three thin strands crawled upward through his palm, shivering with effort, and held.

  He didn't waste time on relief. He moved to the seventh.

  It was quick. Either his control had sharpened, or there was simply nothing left in him to second-guess the motion. He stripped the last body with a clean, brutal efficiency that felt nothing like learning and everything like something older clicking into place.

  Then it was over.

  Blood began to leak from his pores in thin, silky strands of vibrant garnet. The sensation was not violent; it was a slow, draining hollow that left him lightheaded, like water finding its level. Concentric strands of collected blood swirled outward, circling the open tome, awaiting their fate.

  The black rot had sloughed downward and pooled uselessly on the stone. What remained, suspended in the air, was clean.

  Krim rose to his feet. The sharp cynicism had gone out of his face entirely, replaced by something raw and unguarded that he appeared to have no immediate plan to hide. "Seven bodies," he said quietly. "You stripped seven infected corpses." He looked at the tome. Then back at Caldreth. He closed his mouth after that, which for Krim, was the loudest thing he could have done.

  Offer it.

  "It is yours to take," Caldreth huffed, exhausted.

  The blood combined into a single stream, sinking into the open pages of the book as the parchment drank the liquid like thirsty soil. A pulse of satisfaction radiated from the binding, and new script bled onto the pages.

  Blood Acquired. Tithe Taken.

  Vessel Saturation: 30% - Sources: 7

  Red steam curled from the spine as centuries of wear knit themselves back together. When the last snap faded, the battered journal was gone. What replaced it was the color of arterial spray, its cover threaded with dark plum veins that shimmered like trapped shadows. At its center, a garnet gemstone pulsed with the slow, steady beat of a sleeping heart.

  "Thirty percent," Caldreth spat, staring at the number. "You gutted the harvest."

  The tome ignored him. The text shifted, offering an allocation.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  1. Store: Absorb blood for vitality.

  2. Devour: Feed the tome to unlock Chapter II.

  3. Sanguine Crystallization: Bind blood into solid matter. (Cost: 20%)

  Caldreth clenched his trembling hands. "Ten percent to the vessel. Crystallize the rest."

  The tome vibrated. Several thin, needle-like streams of blood spilled from its pages. The liquid wove through the air, forming a delicate, crimson lattice that wrapped around Caldreth's torso and limbs. As the lattice tightened, the blood began to sink into his skin, hissing faintly as it found his pores. As the blood was absorbed, he stood taller, breathed deeper. His heart beat with a new strength, and his vision sharpened, the dim cavern light becoming crisp and detailed.

  "Better," he whispered, his spine straightening as he pushed away from the cold support of the stone. His attention locked back onto the shifting script. The tome bucked in his grip, the crimson ink on the pages boiling into a tight, frantic vortex as it began the conversion.

  With a wet, tearing sound, the blood solidified, revealing a vibrating crystal hovering above the open page. It hummed with an aggressive pitch, the red light inside swirling violently.

  The red ink on the diagram drained, dropping from 20% down to 0%.

  Solidified Coagulum: Veinstone (Unstabilized)

  A crystallized nodule of compressed blood. The outer shell is fragile. Structure is unstable. Rupturing the shell will result in an immediate, uncontrolled release of all stored energy. Handle with extreme caution.

  Type: Catalyst

  Potency: Volatile

  Caldreth reached out and touched it. It was hot.

  "Uncontrolled release," he muttered, curling his fingers around it. The heat of the stone bled into his palm, a sharp, grounding sting that pulled his mind back from the haze of the harvest.

  He walked to the rear of the cavern without difficulty, which was almost worse; his body had no right to feel this steady after what he'd just done. He dropped against the stone wall anyway, the cold of it pressing through his tunic, and sat with it. His legs were fine. His mind felt like wrung-out cloth.

  The Veinstone sat in his palm, an elongated diamond of crystallized blood, its edges sharp as a chipped ruby, radiating a heat that kept pulling his attention back to it. He turned it once, then again. The instinct to show someone rose before he could stop it. He followed it and found a wall. Not absence exactly, more like a closed door at the end of a corridor he hadn't known he was walking down.

  He stood at it for a moment, his fingers tightening around the stone. No face came. No name. Just the door, and the faint, sourceless certainty that knocking would cost him something he couldn't afford right now. He put the feeling away and didn't go looking for what was on the other side.

  The tome eased into the air beside him without a sound. Then it drifted closer, spine tilting toward the stone with a low, greedy thrum.

  "Enough," he snapped. "You've had your fill of blood for now. You don't get the harvest and the harvester."

  He stepped into the book's reach, closing the distance until the heat from its pages washed over his skin. "I am not your well, and I am not your servant. This-" he held up the glowing gem, "-stays with me."

  He tucked the stone deep into his tunic pocket, his hand lingering over it as if daring the book to try and take it.

  The tome froze.

  A vibration rippled across its cover, a low, discordant hum of wounded pride. It snapped shut with a sharp thud, the sound echoing through the cavern like a slammed door. It drifted backward into the shadows, its red glow dimming into a cold, resentful sulk.

  Caldreth let out a heavy breath and slumped against the cavern wall, sliding down until he hit the stone. The smell of the chamber he'd been ignoring: the ichor, sulfur, and copper, suddenly became overwhelming.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, fighting down a wave of nausea. His hands were vibrating, the aftershocks of a body pushed too far, too fast. He pressed his palms against the cold floor, grounding himself, just breathing. In. Out. Trying to convince his heart to stop hammering against his ribs.

  "Alright," Krim muttered, drawing Caldreth's attention back to the center of the chamber. "Grave salt, binding twine, marrow paste. Even packed the silver-threaded chalk. Thought I'd lost that."

  He glanced at Caldreth, taking in the man's pallor and the way he sat against the wall. "Keep that sword close. But maybe stay sitting for a moment. Completing the rising rite this early takes a toll. Raising the dead is no small task."

  "What do you mean by early? These are corpses."

  "I prefer a corpse that's had time to forget the taste of air," Krim muttered, wiping his chalk-dusted hands on his tunic. "The thirteenth night is when the internal hum finally goes quiet. Right now, their bones are still echoing with the lives they just lost."

  Krim pointed. "Grab the legs."

  Caldreth groaned. He tried to push himself up, but his arms felt like lead. "I prefer to watch, not haul the dead."

  Krim didn't bother looking up. "Oh, I'm sorry," he said through a grunt, tugging on a corpse's wrist, "are you too good for manual labor now that you've got a fancy grimoire that eats blood?"

  Caldreth straightened with effort, forcing a smirk onto his face to hide the fatigue. "I am, thank you for asking."

  "Grab their damn legs," Krim barked under a smile.

  Together they dragged three intact corpses, two lesser demons, and the cleaver-wielding warrior toward the open center of the cavern. Krim worked like a madman, scrawling a pentagram into the stone floor. Silver-threaded chalk bit into the dark stone. Grave salt hissed in thin arcs. Bone shards clattered at each of the five points.

  Caldreth folded his arms. "And the aesthetic is intentional?"

  "Very," Krim said. "A good circle is like a good door lock. Prevents things from slipping out of, or into, your corpse. You wouldn't believe how many spirits float around in the aether looking for a doorway."

  He stepped into the center, exhaled once, and let his posture change. A violet gleam crawled across the ritual scar carved into his chest. His hands rose, fingers twitching in sharp patterns.

  "Wait!" Caldreth shouted, stepping forward.

  Krim's hands dropped. The light on his chest stuttered and dimmed. He let out a sharp hiss, glaring at Caldreth.

  "What?" Krim snapped. "I was building momentum. You don't interrupt the incantation."

  "They died screaming and mindless," Caldreth said, eyeing the bodies with disgust. "Does your control extend to the madness in their marrow, or are you giving this blight a fresh start?"

  Krim's eyes rolled, but his attention stayed anchored to the bodies at their feet. "A valid concern for a novice. But look closer."

  He pointed a chalk-dusted finger at the ground beneath the bodies. Thick, black sludge was pooling there, separating from the skin like marrow seeping from a split bone.

  "The bodies are empty husks now. That will allow my darkcraft to settle in without trouble." Krim explained.

  He shooed Caldreth back with a flick of his wrist.

  "Now, hush. The dead are waiting.”

  Krim reset his stance.

  "Rise," Krim intoned, his voice dropping into the low, grinding cadence of the Necropolis. "The debt of breath is paid. Service is the coin that remains."

  He brought his hands together with a clap.

  "By bone and binding, I claim what death has left behind." Words rasped from his throat, low syllables dragging across the floor like chains.

  The pentagram ignited.

  Violet fire threaded through the chalk lines. Shadows bent. The cavern felt as though something unseen leaned in to watch.

  Joints cracked. Arms jerked. Violet flames spidered across the corpses.

  Krim's lips peeled into a breathless grin. "There we go,” he huffed, bending slightly. "Three at once. I'll take it."

  "That's it?" Caldreth said. "I imagined… more."

  "They were corpses," Krim scoffed, dropping onto a stone. "Now they're mine. That's necromancy, whether it impresses you or not."

  Caldreth held firm as three undead rose to their feet without warning. Eyes glowing with a faint violet hue. Their movements were stiff, stripped of all the maddening frenzy he had fought minutes ago.

  Caldreth eyed the warrior's blank stare. "You're sure you can control them?"

  "Absolutely," Krim wiped his brow. "I wove a few nasty surprises into their bones if their loyalty slips," Krim said, his fingers twitching as if pulling invisible trigger-strings.

  He snapped his fingers. "Carry my pack." The warrior lurched forward, obeying, hefting Phylin's bag across its back.

  Krim grinned. "See? Beautiful."

  Caldreth ignored the shuffling undead and began to pace the perimeter of the cavern, his eyes scanning the stone. "There must be a way out of this hole," he muttered to himself, his voice echoing in the space. He didn't want to double back the way they came and go around the mountain they had entered.

  He paused near the back of the cavern, where the shadows pooled deepest. He went still, closing his eyes. At first, there was only the sound of Krim's restless movements, but then he felt it, a gentle, cool breeze he hadn't noticed before. It was faint, brushing against his face, carrying the scent of dust and rot. A narrow passage was tucked behind a cluster of stalagmites.

  "Netherbane," Caldreth called out, his tone sharp. "Over here."

  The necromancer wandered over, trailing his new pack mule. "What is it?"

  "Air," Caldreth said, pointing into the dark gap. "A draft. This passage must take us out to the other side. A shortcut under the mountain we entered."

  Krim tilted his head, sniffing the air with a skeptical frown. "It's tight. And if it collapses, we're buried."

  Caldreth didn't wait for a consensus. He retrieved his sword, the weight of the Grave Watch blade reassuring in his hand. "Better to risk a cave-in than to walk around in the open. Keep your pets close, Necromancer. We're leaving."

  He stepped into the narrow gap, the cool air pulling him forward like a physical tether.