The choice hung suspended in crimson glyphs, bathing the ruined checkpoint in stagnant light. Milda took a step toward him, her pale knuckles tightening around the brass handle of her cage-lamp. "Voldis... the wick. If you take it, I can rekindle—" "Shut up," Voldis ground out. He made his input without pausing. In speedrunning, you never sacrificed a persistent area-of-effect aura for a temporary stat cushion. You hoarded your resources, ate the damage, and compensated with frame-perfect inputs later. He selected Option B. [Option B Confirmed. Enduring Venom.] [Rotting Marrow Progression: 334.67 days remaining.] A sharp crack resounded inside his chest, like frozen twigs snapping under a boot. A thick spray of tar-colored bile erupted from his mouth, spattering the stone floor. It smoked where it landed, eating tiny pits into the masonry. Zemyna pushed herself upright from the flagstones where he had shoved her. Her silver Alderkin braids were disheveled, her rapier trembling in a hand that refused to stay steady. "Why?" Her voice cracked, shredded between wounded pride and sheer bewilderment. "You pushed me away. You took the blow. Why would you—" "You were standing in my killbox," Voldis wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, leaving a smear of dark oil across his cracked lips. "You block my retreat path, I fix the obstacle. Don't flatter yourself, princess." Her face went crimson. "You arrogant, miserable cur! I didn't ask for your salvation!" "Then don't thank me," Voldis muttered, already turning toward the ascent chains. *** Two hours later, the bells of the Black-Spire Athenaeum tolled through the freezing mist of the upper tiers. The ascent hoist had dragged the survivors back to the academic perches, leaving the dead to rot in the fog. High Prelate Jurgis sat behind a massive desk carved from fossilized weir-wood inside the Sanctum of Inscriptions. His beard was pristine, threaded with ivory beads, and his linen robes smelled faintly of myrrh and dried belladonna. On the polished grain between them lay an uncut prism the size of a fist, humming with a sickly violet resonance. "A Grade-Four Void Tear Crystal," Jurgis murmured, his voice soft as sifted flour. "Extracted from the belly of a deep-tier crawler. A student of your station would normally labor three semesters to earn such a boon, Voldis." Voldis kept his posture rigid, shoulders squared despite the raw fire throbbing beneath his collarbone. "The descent test was compromised, Prelate. Those cables snapped under deliberate strain." "The world below is treacherous," Jurgis said smoothly. He pushed the crystal forward with a single manicured finger. "We do not weep for cracked pottery; we fire the clay harder. Absorb it. Let your meridians drink. I need you strong, my boy. The Athenaeum needs a paragon from the lower ranks to shame the complacent bloodlines." [Item: Greater Umbral Lattice Core] [Contains: 180,000 Unallocated EXP] [Accept transaction? Y/N] It was an absurd sum of experience. In the original game progression, Kaspars was supposed to receive this after clearing the Sunken Scriptorium in Act Two. Jurgis was force-feeding him progression like grain to a goose before the slaughter. "Thank you, Prelate," Voldis said, bowing low. "Take your time. Meditate upon it," Jurgis stood, smoothing his robes. "I must attend the High Council to deliver my report on the descent casualties. Remain here until the resonance stabilizes. Do not touch the codices on the shelves." The elder walked out, the heavy oak doors groaning shut behind him, the iron latch falling into place with a definitive click. Voldis dropped the humble facade instantly. He had twelve minutes before the patrol routine looped Jurgis back through the western corridor. The desk was secured with an Arcanist’s Masterwork deadbolt—an impossible pick for his current dexterity stat, requiring a level seventy-five rogue or the Grand Seal key hanging from Jurgis’s belt. Keys were obsolete. Voldis knelt beside the left pedestal of the weir-wood desk. In *Hollows of Oskol*, interior furniture models shared collision boundaries with their parent room meshes, but the physics engine handled drawer interiors as separate dynamic containers. If an actor forced their field-of-view camera between two intersecting polygon surfaces while executing a resting animation, the third-person perspective clipped clean through the wood. He wedged his back against the desk's ornate leg, unequipped his chest armor to shrink his character hitbox by four inches, and rapidly toggled the rest emote. *Sit. Stand. Cancel. Sit.* On the fourth cancel, his perspective jerked violently. The heavy oak blurred into gray wireframes. His sight plunged directly into the locked central drawer. There lay no gold. No seal. Instead, a parchment of flayed skin rested flat against velvet, covered in precise diagrams. It showed an anatomical sketch of an Alderkin youth, overlaid with complex runic channels converging directly upon the heart. Voldis’s gaze tracked the archaic annotations etched along the margins. The handwriting belonged to Jurgis. *Step I: Plant the Seed. Introduce the Marrow-Weevil to the vessel at infancy. Let the soul-strain ripen through agony.* *Step II: The Catalyst. Drive the host to the absolute ceiling of mortal capacity. Level 100 required to achieve Vessel Resilience.* *Step III: The Reaping. Upon reaching the pinnacle, the parasite dissolves the host's ego, leaving the perfected meat hollow. The Grand Prelate migrates at dawn of the final day.* Acid rose in the back of his throat. The game had lied. The Echo Log had omitted the true condition. Experience points offered no cure. The infection was no simple biological blight to out-level; it was an incubator. Every stat increase only reinforced his physical fibers so they would survive the influx of Jurgis's ancient, decaying soul. Reaching the level cap wouldn't save his life. It was the execution trigger. "You bastard," Voldis breathed, tearing his vision out of the glitch boundary. He stood, his knuckles bone-white against the edge of the desk. Every speedrun route he had mapped in his head—every EXP farming sequence, every cheese tactic to hit maximum level before the 334 days expired—it was all funneling him straight into an old man’s meat-suit. *Boom!* The heavy sanctum doors shattered inward with a deafening roar of splintering timber. Iron hinges sheared clean off the stone frame, skipping across the marble floor like flat stones across water. Dust and red mist billowed into the room, carrying the stench of copper and curdled bile. Standing in the ruined threshold was Kaspars. His fine academy uniform hung in wet, shredded ribbons. His skin was gray, mottled with protruding black veins that pulsated beneath the flesh of his neck like writhing worms. Blood dripped from his fingertips, his fingernails split and elongated into jagged crimson talons. But worst of all were his eyes—the whites had vanished entirely, replaced by pools of bubbling, pitch-black sludge. "Voldis!" Kaspars shrieked, his voice splitting into three discordant octaves that rattled the glassware on the shelves. "You stole my ring... you stole my glory... but the deep blood gave me more!" He drew a jagged, rusted greatsword slick with fresh viscera and leveled it at Voldis's chest. "Give me your core, thief, or I'll tear it out through your throat!"

The Prelate's Harvest