Three days had passed.
No sleep.
No ti to eat.
Not that Kai needed to, anyway.
When he finally ca across it, covered in blood, guts, and dirt, he sighed.
Before him stood a seemingly normal tree.
It was anything but normal.
Kai pulled down on a small branch, and the ground shifted beneath his feet. The tree rotated as it moved through the soil, revealing a hold in the boulder it was almost rged with.
Steps led down.
A lot of steps.
Kai counted, as he'd done for the longest ti.
Half a day. That's how long it took to reach his destination.
The village looked exactly as Orlin had described to him: a hollowed throat under the earth, carved streets and low roofs covered with lichen and the pale fungus that lit the underdark, but here everything lived in a damp, artificial dusk. The sky was a ceiling of stone, ribbed with faint veins of mica, a type of mineral that shone in the bioluminescence of the mushrooms and scattered it into soft pools of colour.
One man-made tunnel served as the entrance; one served as the exit. The rest of the place had been built to survive under the ground and, in ti, to be purposely forgotten.
He moved slow, boots whispering on packed earth, the portal crystals thudding quietly against each other in his satchel. Passageways opened into courtyards rimd with mold.
Doorways stood ajar, hinges eaten by rust and fungus. The air tasted of old smoke and rot and the tallic tang of iron. It was not unlike the ruin in Mirth, only smaller, more intimate; the destruction felt like it had purpose behind it.
Kai claid the largest house first, the one that must once have been the lord's or mayor's. Its outer walls were intact, spared the worst of the collapse; the interior, however, had been looted, broken, scoured. Tapestries had been stripped from the walls, furnishings smashed into firewood or pried apart for usable iron. Books lay scattered and waterlogged, pages stuck in bloated curls. There was nothing. Ti had eaten the knowledge.
The house slled of old ink and cold earth and sothing else.
An echo of mory that tugged at the base of his skull.
One that ca not from him.
Flashes of this hidden village flared in his head, created by the crown. Nas, faces, and death all tried to stay seated in his own mories, but Kai forced them away.
He set up in the central hall anyway. If anything could be made useful it would be here: the ceilings high enough for any of his undead to stand. Even Grond.
A large enough space for all of his sigils and experints.
The room has a hearth still serviceable enough to heat the rooms, a cellar cool enough to preserve the artifacts he planned to test.
He dragged a battered table into the center and began laying out his instrunts.
His bone chalk for sigils, vials for soul ichor, and enough life essence to complete any experint he could desire.
Kai cleared the room of debris and cast a soft barrier over it; the sigil's hum settled like a breathing creature in the stone.
Days passed in a pattern of motion and calculation.
As he used magic, he replenished his life essence by siphoning small drips from withered roots and the few scrub trees and glowing fungi that would tolerate the cavern's lack of light.
He worked late into the night carving sigils and scaffolding small experints. He tried new arrangents of sigils for his dampening gloves and then tried a new thing entirely.
Adding a sigil to the Abyssal Band itself.
He inscribed layer upon layer of symbols onto a piece of parchnt.
'Ti. More. Extension. Strength. Resolution.'
Kai thought over the aning of each symbol as he inscribed them. As he continued, the bone chalk shattered into dust and he quickly churned through his reserves.
Once finished, he wiped his brow, grabbed the piece of parchnt, and took a deep breath.
He placed the parchnt on the band around his arm and...
Nothing.
It wasn't that it failed.
The entire world around him disappeared.
He felt his consciousness flee.
Not from the failed attempt, but from the pain.
The band was resisting.
The souls residing within were not happy about him tampering with their ho. Their sanctuary.
"Blaspher!"
"Fool!"
"Child!"
The voices grew louder than his own thoughts.
This continues for an unknowable amount of ti until Kai regained consciousness.
His clothes were soaked in blood and vomit.
The rest of that day was spent recuperating.
He still felt the strength of the voices pounding in his head, even though the village was silent.
---
The next day, he re-tuned the sigil on his chest to drink ambient mana deeper.
He tested binding sigils on scraps of bone, then on charred planks, pulling at the whisper-thin seam between them.
When he damaged one, the other was damaged as much in turn.
'This could have so many possibilities!'
The manor's echoing hall watched him like a patient thing.
Then, with a shock, he realized he could slip a thread of perception into Seyren, appearing as Seyrel now, from the shared-senses link he'd left open in the earlier soul contract.
It was not his first ti reaching through another's eyes, but what bled through this ti felt like a knife.
Seyrel's vision was a scrape of darkness and torchlight.
The world through her eyes was a cramped room and the press of hands and cords and spikes, the sll of tal and sweat.
Voices barked questions in a clipped tone that felt like a blade around the throat.
Through the burlap sack over her head, he could make out two masculine figures.
"Where is the necromancer boy?! We know he was with your group!" One of the figures commanded.
Instrunts clinked.
He heard her voice, Seyrel's cry, then a whip, then silence.
His stomach rolled with the doubled sensation of being an observer and helpless: soone else's fear threaded into his skin.
He pushed his senses and heard sothing from a nearby cell. Vepice, chains, hysterical screams tearing her throat raw. She was also being tortured.
Then laughter ca. Orlin's laughter, too bright and brittle for the place it ca from.
He tried to follow that laughter, to flip through to Orlin's senses and drag them toward him with the shared sigil, but the link was not there; he hadn't created a shared senses sigil on him.
The thought of Orlin's voice, laughing while Vepice was broken, breathed ice down Kai's spine. He cut the link with Seyrel and snapped back into his own body with a hard, ragged breath.
Silence in the manor swallowed him.
"They're suffering because of . If they can't co to , I'll have to find a way back to them. But for that, I can't dwell on it. I need to be stronger. Much stronger."
He moved chanically toward the main room. By the table in the centre, he pulled from his shadow space. A large instrunt rose out of it like a creature coming to life.
It roared with a magical fire.
The soil forge.
The soul forge was not pretty. It sat like a blackened altar of iron and glass, inscribed with sigils that humd low enough to feel in the ribs. Heat licked from its vents in tiny, controlled bursts.
When Kai opened it, a faint sour wind breathed back. Remnants of the souls he'd already placed inside.
He had used the forge before to stabilize weaker soul echoes; it turned leftovers into stable products or stitched them together for controlled experints. Here, in the manor with no witnesses, it felt like a scalpel waiting in his hands.
A scalpel ready to sever the very laws of the world.
"Now, I guess I need a few more souls for experintation. Might as well fill my reserves while I can."
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