Gareth woke up to a green blinking icon in the corner of his vision, that strangely resembled the symbol for radioactivity.

  His body ached tremendously, which wasn't new at least. His ankles weren’t sore anymore, which was good.

  Unfortunately, he could also hear tens of wheezes, and one demented whisperer...which was bad.

  He kept his eyes closed to continue the illusion of being unconscious, the blinking light being there even with his eyes closed. He assessed his body and found it to be unbroken, just incredibly sore in every fiber of muscle and ring of bone.

  He could likewise feel that he was lying on cold, unworked stone, pebbles digging into his back. Speaking of cold; his toes and fingers were so cold as to be almost inoperable, and it was only through a viscous force of will that he suppressed his violent shivers.

  He focussed on the glowing green light. A green screen immediately popped up.

  Warning!

  An Oni broodmother is attempting to implant a foreign soul ....failed: host soul still present!

  You have sustained damage and have lost your heart.

  An Oni broodmother is attempting to implant a foreign soul ....failed: host soul still present!

  There were ten more of these messages before they changed drastically and alarmingly.

  Warning!

  Repeated attempts at soul emplacement have temporarily displaced your soul.

  Implanting foreign soul...error. Your soul has replaced foreign soul in your body.

  Warning! Contaminant detected.

  Up until this moment the messages had been a deep crimson red, the moment "contaminant" appeared each subsequent message was the same sickly green the radioactive symbol had been.

  Contaminant detected. Native soul has primary authority over the vessel. Contaminant dormant.

  That was where the messages ended and “hgggh”, Gareth shuddered as he imagined something crawling inside of him.

  The Doctor had done that a few times, brought worms and introduced them into his body to see if they would gain his immortality. Unfortunately, Ian, the sadistic fuck that he was, had ordered the Doctor to never use anesthetics. So Gareth had felt intimately as each bug crawled under his skin and nested. He had regularly had nightmares about small insect spawn coming out of holes in his body.

  However, like all the trauma he had endured, he had grown numb to it, which was how he could suppress the full body shudder at that mental image. He didn’t dream when he slept anymore, but at least he didn't have nightmares either! You gotta look out for those positives!

  Deciding that he had learned as much as possible Gareth opened his eyes slightly...and very quickly squeezed them shut again.

  All around him, standing vigil in the black and white dim light, were monsters.

  They resembled humans in their shape and form, but their backs were hunched, their knees inverted to support themselves running on all-fours. Their lips had been cut off, revealing yellow-stained teeth permanently ringed by tattered flesh.

  Black matted hair hung from their gaunt faces, their genitalia freely exposed on their nude bodies. Dirt smeared their cold, skin-and-bones limbs to take away the last of what was evidently their humanity.

  These people were long since corrupted into the wheezing, ruby eyed creatures that had dragged him here in the first place.

  He lay dead still, yet the dark and twisted whispers in a language he couldn't understand suddenly increased in pitch, fever, and tone. It became more passionate, more angry, then a guttural growling interlaced the words until he could hear the creature screaming hysterically, spitting with fervour.

  “HACKNAH ITOMNOUSH FALNOUR KEN OREN!”

  It grew to such an intensity that Gareth couldn't help but look over.

  There, standing over a mutilated corpse, stood a creature out of nightmares. Three metres tall, blue skinned with blood-red tattoos across its blood-slick hairy body.

  Its horns were jagged and adorned with severed ears and pruned eyeballs.

  Large saggy breasts swung in the fervor with which she waived her arms in supplication of some dark ritual.

  A human corpse lay atop a rust coloured altar. Spittle flew from her black-toothed maw, vitriol carried both within her voice and baleful yellow eyes.

  She was a demon, she just had to be with how terrifyingly, abhorrently unholy she spat and chanted in a language from hell. Oozing red runes were grotesquely carved into the corpse in front of her with a rusted, jagged ceremonial dagger as she chanted her hateful hymn. Her movements erratic and possessed as she chopped and chopped and chopped and chopped.

  Gradually the red, which had seemed to be inky blood covering the corpse, became a deeper crimson altogether. It glowed with a malicious and hedonistic light, which any amateur could see as ‘Dark Magic’.

  Within seconds the runes dimmed and the supposedly dead body started thrashing back and forth.

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  The sick snap of cracking bone echoed through the cursed chamber as the corpse's knees wrenched backwards, the patella shifting beneath the pallid skin, as the tendons holding it in place snapped and repositioned. If the person had been alive, they would have lost their sanity from the pain.

  The corpse, which had been a man in his thirties, lost significant weight as its injuries sealed. Its skin sagging from rapid loss of fat, then tightening as each spare scrap of meat was sucked away to who-knows-where. Its hips thrust, its shoulders twisted, and Gareth half-thought it would writhe off the altar.

  The witch cackled madly as the skin between its saggy red breasts peeled back, and a red orb, writhing with thin black chains, floated free of its chest cavity. The orb was the size of a blood orange. Pulsing slowly as it rotated along its axis.

  She sagged, her arms supporting her hunched figure on either side of the corpse, as she tiredly continued her walachian whispering. Her thin, emaciated arms trembling, while her potbelly jiggled.

  A red ribbon of light peeled off of the orb and snaked its way into the heart of the transformed body. It ceased its thrashing and opened its ruby red eyes.

  As the final part of the ceremony, the witch raised that same rusty, crusty, and serrated dagger. With agonisingly slow and imprecise methods she cut off the man's lips, ears and eyelids.

  It was something straight out of a nightmare.

  In one final flash of power the thing impaled the parted pieces of flesh onto her horns. It was disgusting and revolting to such an extent that Gareth was forced to gag once or twice ...which is what got him into trouble.

  The moment he moved, the witch looked directly into his eyes and a pulse of power made his body go limp.

  He could feel it now, the foreign contaminant was not a physical poison but a mental worm as the overwhelming desire to do whatever the Broodmother told him... took over. He was under her command and helpless to resist. As they kept an unbroken stare-off, the Oni's core floated back into her chest, which promptly stitched itself back up.

  The moment her chest closed the compulsion over Gareth intensified a hundredfold. Whereas before he could resist enough to not move at all, now he was forced to get up and march towards his doom... towards the altar.

  As he got closer, the incessant whispering intensified, now not only from the mouth of the Broodmother but from inside his very own head. He could hear her thoughts but they were just at the edge of being decipherable, teasing at his mind and urging him to listen more closely.

  “Come, heed my call. Step forth and taste the secrets of my bountiful wisdom, gain power beyond understanding. Prostrate yourself before me, my child. Your potential is bountiful as the Dark Pits. Your gifts shall be many, should your devotion be true...my slave.

  As a token of my faith in your potential, I will grant you this mark: Berserker’s Rage

  To show fealty to the old darkness, I will grant you this trait: The mark of devouring..

  And to show reverence to the High Succubus, I will pierce your heart, so that love will never again beat within your chest.”

  And this is the part where the ritual failed. See, a central part of what makes an Oni Broodmother so dangerous was that she could do exactly what she did with the previous corpse, to corpses strewn across any battlefield. She could revive her enemies and bring them back as her own puppets. Even if they weren't dead before they got to her, they would still inevitably die to a dagger to the heart during the ceremony.

  The only problem was that Gareth was immortal.

  His heart will never stop beating, he will therefore someday feel love again...meaning in an extremely delicate and deliberate ritual, where every component and word was purposeful, this offering to the High Succubus was false.

  The ritual failed, but the Oni did not realise this.

  Gareth came back to himself to see a dagger in his chest, bloody runes and marks carved into his arms, legs, and across his pecks. An orb peeled out from the Oni's grotesque sternum right above him, itself an oozing wound of black sludge.

  She was so engrossed in her whispering that she didn't notice that Gareth was no longer under her control, much to her detriment. He grabbed a silver candlestick right next to her head, then swung it at the most vulnerable part of any cultivator's anatomy; their core. As he swung, the compulsion placed upon him by the contaminant tried to make his arm go numb, and he very nearly dropped the candlestick as he sagged back in exhaustion, but he would not bow. He would not break.

  He had promised Ivor that he would take hold of his offer with both hands and make something of himself. He had promised himself that his past would not define his future.

  I'll be damned if I'm gonna let some saggy granny from hell turn me into those things, and end my adventure here! Fuck...that!

  Its silver handle seemed to weigh a metric ton as he put his entire shoulder into the swing.

  Right before he made contact his strength seemed to leave him entirely, but he had gotten close enough. The edge of the silver candlestick clipped her core…and all hell seemed to break loose.

  Each and every cursed creature screamed in horrific pain, scrambling around and over each other like frightened cats trapped in a small room with a classroom of toddlers. The Oni Broodmother similarly screeched in horrific pain and clutched at her empty chest, falling helplessly to her side as she scrambled into a fetal position.

  The pain must have caused a lapse in her concentration, as fresh strength poured through Gareth's body. He reared back and slammed his trusty silver candlestick once more into the crimson unholy core.

  Cracks scattered across its surface, and the Oni howled in utter agony. Light started leaking from between the cracks in the orb, and little sparks of red electricity arced randomly through the air, like radioactive particles off a uranium core.

  He knew there would likely be a massive explosion if he had completely broken the core, as each person with common sense could deduce. Nevertheless, his immortality had been tested time and time-again. He knew for a fact that he would survive, somehow, and they would not.

  So, with one last snap of his arm, he shattered the orb!

  Several things happened simultaneously: The Oni immediately stopped moving and died. Her sickly yellow eyes turned glassy and unfocused. The other cursed kept running around and screaming into the air -- luckily staying away from the altar -- and a red skull icon appeared in the corner of his vision. Last, but certainly not least, the orb exploded. Or at least, that's what seemed to happen as Gareth was engulfed in a red cloud of roiling essence, lightning, and smoke.

  It churned and turned around him, and he felt an intense burning sensation over his limbs and abdomen. He looked down to see the grimly carved runes in his flesh starting to absorb the red light. The burn increased to a sear and Gareth bit down on his tongue to avoid screaming.

  A second passed and Gareth bit clear through his tongue as the pain felt like it cauterised every inch of his body.

  "eeeaaAAAAAA!!!!!"

  Without prompting, a red system notification popped up and Gareth was thankful for any distraction, anything to try and forget about the pain.

  Congratulations!

  Foreign contaminants destroyed!

  Warning! Foreign mana binding with flesh-engraved runes!

  Attempting placement of [Mark of devouring], [Rune of the Berserker]

  Do you accept these runes?

  Yes? / No?

  In Gareth's pain induced fugue state he could barely process the words, but could reason that foreign mana wasn't a good thing. Through tear filled eyes, he looked down to see his skin cracking, red light peeking from between the cracks, yet the runes kept absorbing more and more of the churning mana around him.

  He selected “No.”