The blood pool’s level sank fast.
As the crimson liquid was gulped down, a mass of flesh bobbed to the surface in the whirlpool’s center.
Fist-sized. Dark red, with a sickly, semi-translucent sheen. Its skin was a lattice of fine, pulsing blood vessels.
The mont it broke free, it began to beat.
Thump-thump…
Thump-thump…
A heart. Clear. Powerful. Its rhythm echoed through the damp, stone basent.
That beat was the signal.
The white mycelium coating the pool’s surface surged toward it, a tidal wave of fungal threads.
Countless filants wrapped the pulsating heart, weaving, knitting, overlapping…
Within the cocoon, a vague, roughly humanoid shape slowly erged…
Wilbur took an instinctive half-step back. His eyes widened, not just with shock but with a deep, visceral revulsion.
Then,
as Wilbur watched in dawning horror,
the blurry humanoid—stitched from rot and fungus—lifted from the pool as if weightless.
“Get in there. Now.”
Aldrich’s voice cut through the silence, cold but edged with a feverish thrill.
Wilbur’s body locked. He swallowed hard, fighting the nausea rising in his throat, the primal dread seeping into his bones.
He moved forward, arms rising in a slow, reluctant embrace.
He hugged the thing. Skinless. Slimy. Still twitching.
Contact was the trigger.
The viscous fluid coating the blurry form, which had begun to stiffen, exploded with renewed “life.” It surged from the point of contact, crawling up his arms, his chest, his neck…
Until his entire upper body was sheathed in that warm, wet, unnatural “flesh.”
The sensation was sticky, thick, almost alive…
Then the surface of that flesh split.
Countless tiny mouths opened.
Innurable needle-fine mycelial tips speared through his skin.
And began.
With a force beyond resistance, they forced their way in. Through the pores, the hair follicles, the micro-tears in his epidermis. Drilling into muscle, weaving between vessels, probing the gaps in his bones.
“AAAAAH—!!!”
Agony beyond comprehension shattered his world.
It wasn’t the clean pain of a blade. It was a violation—a thousand invasive roots burrowing, splicing, rging with his very substance. A tornt that scraped the limits of a Third-Rank Corpse Plague Acolyte’s hardened nerves.
His scream tore from his throat, raw and animal.
Aldrich watched from three paces away, his expression detached. A scientist observing a specin. No aid. No pity.
Ti stretched in the basent’s fetid air, marked only by the fading screams.
The shrieks rasped, weakened, dwindled into choked whimpers…
When Aldrich decided the process was complete,
he moved.
A blur. He appeared behind the shuddering, barely-conscious Wilbur.
His scarred hand—pale, webbed with old wounds—didn’t hesitate.
He plunged it, wrist-deep, into the quivering mass of flesh enveloping Wilbur’s head!
A quick, brutal rummage.
Then he yanked.
With a sickening, suctioning rip, he pulled Wilbur free—like a midwife delivering a nightmare.
“Cough! Gah—!”
Wilbur collapsed onto the cold, sli-slick stone, gasping in the rotten air. His eyes were glazed, pupils wide with a terror so deep it felt carved into his soul.
He would never forget that feeling. Never.
Yet, bizarrely, his body showed no wound. No torn skin. His clothes were soaked with viscous fluid, but intact.
The foreign flesh inside him had gone quiet. Its connection to the “mother body” severed, it began to dissolve, breaking down into a raw, absorbable nutrient.
The sensation was like a potent, ssy “Blood Potion.” His fatigue ebbed, his muscles humd—but the boost was diffuse, inefficient.
That wasn’t the point.
Wilbur forced his head up, his gaze trembling as it found the blood pool.
The flesh-humanoid was gone.
In its place stood a naked man, silent at the pool’s edge.
A person.
More accurately: a person whose height, build, muscle definition, facial features, the exact placent of every scar, the sickly pallor and texture of the skin…
Were identical to Wilbur’s.
If he hadn’t seen it born, if he hadn’t felt it rge with him, he’d have sworn he was looking into a mirror.
But a mirror reverses left and right.
The figure before him did not.
To any witness—it was Wilbur.
Perfect. Complete. Down to the last pore.
Wilbur stared, his breathing shallow, at his silent, eyes-closed doppelgänger.
Slowly, he turned his head toward Aldrich.
The older man was still studying the “Blood Pool Clone,” his eyes burning with a fervor he no longer bothered to hide.
Even he looked surprised. The experint had worked on the first try.
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