Chapter 1229: Story 1229: Buried Alive
Lena awoke coughing dirt from her mouth.
Her arms were pinned above her head, wrists scraped raw from the rope that bound her to the wooden post. Cold soil filled her boots, and sothing small and sharp crawled down the back of her neck.
Around her: darkness. The sll of rot. Damp, enclosed space.
Then—chanting. Muffled, rhythmic. Just above her.
She was underground.
Buried alive.
She scread, but the sound bounced back at her. Muffled by the dirt-packed ceiling of the pit. She tried to kick, but her feet were caught in a tangle of old bones and viscera.
A coffin? No. A crypt.
The walls pulsed faintly—veins of so organic growth embedded in the clay. They moved like they were breathing. Feeding. Listening.
“You were chosen,” ca a whisper from the earth itself.
“Shut up,” Lena hissed. “You’re not real.”
“You carry the silence of the old world. But silence is not death. It is rebirth.”
She thrashed. Pain spiked down her spine. Then—click.
A portion of the wall slid open.
Light spilled in, but it wasn’t sunlight. It was green. Sickly. And it ca from hundreds of bioluminescent fungus pods lining a tunnel.
Lena pulled herself toward it.
She crawled through the slit, dragging her battered body into the fungal tunnel. Every breath she took tasted like mildew and copper. Every blink burned her eyes.
But she kept going.
Sothing shuffled behind her.
Lena turned.
It wasn’t human—not anymore.
A forr escapee, half-decomposed and hollow-eyed, slithered forward using its tongue like a third arm. It wore the remnants of a lab coat. Its natag: Dr. Farren. The na buzzed faintly in her head.
She rembered him. He’d vanished weeks ago.
Now, he smiled.
“I tried to reason with them too,” he gurgled. “But the earth always wins.”
He lunged. She kicked him square in the jaw, sending him sprawling back into the crypt. The tunnel behind her collapsed, trapping him.
But the echo of his voice lingered.
“They’ll hear you now. You’re closer than you know.”
Lena kept crawling.
At the end of the tunnel was a chamber.
Circular. Lined with masks—wooden, bone, and flesh. In the center, a raised platform… and a shallow grave. Open. Waiting.
The chanting returned, this ti louder.
Above her, sowhere, the cult prepared their final rite.
And Lena realized:
They weren’t just burying her to die.
They were burying her to beco one of them.
She looked at the grave. Then at the jagged bone shard clenched in her hand.
If she was going down, it would be with teeth bared and blood drawn.
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