Content Warnings: Body horror, Gore
Edited by maymay as of 5 Oct 2023.
Maybe I’m going to die right now.
The young mage apprentice, the hapless Evan Reeves, heard a voice resounding indistinctly in his skull.
He couldn’t quite tell if he was hallucinating, or if he was actually talking to himself.
At that moment, he was trembling, hiding in his dirty and narrow room. There was neither a bed nor a window. All he had was an air vent, as wide as his palm, located near the ceiling. A black iron fence divided the small rectangular vent into five neat squares, but wind would only blow through it once in a blue moon.
The floor and walls were made of rough stone, the gaps between them were filled with an unidentifiable mucous and strange dark green moss. The air was always filled with a damp smell, seemingly able to fill one’s lungs with water.
Evan and his former roommate, a sea dwarf that always looked a bit crazy, had tied one corner of a cloak to the fence of the vent, tying the other end to an iron hook on the opposite side of the room that had been placed there for unknown purposes.
Truthfully, Evan always thought that the iron hook was used to hang corpses. He had seen many similar hooks on the wall of his instructor’s room. After cutting the throats of unlucky test subjects, they could be hung upside down on the wall to drain their blood cleanly.
But of course, when the occupants of this room hung the cloak on that hook to create an extremely uncomfortable hammock, neither Evan nor his roommate mentioned the similar iron hooks on their instructor’s wall.
The “hammock” was truly uncomfortable. Sleeping on it for an hour or two would make your lower spine scream in pain, but it could at least keep Evan away from the humid ground and the unidentifiable poisonous insects that stalked around in the dark.
Yet he wasn’t sleeping in that hammock right now.
He was currently bent over, curled up in pain in the corner of the room, panting continuously.
Evan used to be a pretty good-looking young man.
He was tall, with well-proportioned, handsome features. His light green eyes and black hair, once gave him an aura almost like a nobleman’s. However, that was a thing of the past. The only words you would use to describe the current Evan Reeves would be miserable and shabby.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
Dibbv rajlcfv tjio bo tlr ybvs gfv, tlr tjlg jcv rtbeivfgr kfgf ybat mtjggfv jc bwlcber yijmx vef ab wjulm olgf.
Ktf gfjrbc kts Snjc kjr tbivlcu tlwrfio lc atlr megifv eq qbrlalbc kjr yfmjerf tf tjv ab erf tlr kfjx tjcvr ab mieamt tlr rabwjmt. Llr qjiw kjr qgfrrfv eq jujlcra atf bqfc kbecv, ktfgf rbwf rilqqfgs atlcur kfgf agslcu ab ifjx bea abufatfg klat tlr yibbv…
Evan sincerely hoped that those weren’t his intestines.
Just a quarter of an hour ago, a deformed tri-horned demon almost tore his stomach open.
Thankfully, Evan escaped at the last moment, but the fatal wound was still there. The pain radiating from it reminded Evan that he needed a potion.
Sometimes, even he didn’t know how that young countryman, who had finally discovered his talent in magic after a lot of effort, and that young apprentice, who had entered the greatest mage tower in the North under the admiring and envious gazes of others, had been reduced to this sorry state.
“You know, at first, I thought I would become a great mage…”
Evan started talking to himself again, he was trying to keep himself from passing out.
At the very beginning, when he entered the Mage Tower, he thought all he needed to face was ordinary troubles and strict standards. However, as everyone knows, for a low-level apprentice at the bottom of the Mage Tower’s pecking order—maybe only slightly better than those wailing test subjects—being put on the spot and having to adhere to strict standards set by their instructors became almost as natural as breathing.
Frail human beings needed water and air and food, just as lowly apprentices needed the censure and insults of their instructor.
Evan just didn’t expect the troubles and harsh standards to quickly escalate into varying degrees of deliberate sabotage and extensive corporal punishment. The instructor assigned to him was an eerie old man who was so skinny that his bones were showing.
It didn’t take long for Evan to realize that an obviously incompetent person like that of his instructor would be a most troublesome existence for him. After all, one of them was an old man approaching his sixties, still stuck at the bottom of the mage tower, while the other was a young, energetic mage apprentice with a brilliant future.
Sometimes, the jealousy of human beings is more terrifying than the venom of scorpions.
His instructor enthusiastically ordered Evan to participate in various dangerous experiments. For example, he’d make Evan, who had not even mastered low-level fireball skills, carry a bucket to feed a highly deformed tri-horned demon. Even a child would know that a delectable human like Evan was what tri-horned demons considered real food.
Well, if Evan hadn’t secretly learned those variations of small fireball spells, he truly might’ve become the demon’s meal. Of course, it was still more likely that he would end up as a test subject for his “instructor”.
It goes without saying that instructors would rather consider humans, like Evan, more suitable as raw materials for experiments, than as clumsy apprentices. If it weren’t for the strict rules set by the master of the mage tower, he probably would have died countless times by now.
Evan knew that he didn’t have much time left—no matter how strict the rules were, loopholes would always exist. For example, the rules would protect the fragile and stupid apprentices in life, but they would not protect the bodies of the dead, particularly those who died due to various substances or incorrect experimental procedures.
These days, the instructor’s gaze on Evan had become increasingly obscure and ominous. As a rather smart young man,he had managed to survive thus far thanks to the Goddess of Magic, Evan guessed that his instructor had planned countless “accidents” in order to obtain his corpse.
“Damn…”
Thinking of his instructor, Evan involuntarily groaned in pain. He groped with one hand and moved a loose stone brick in the corner aside before retrieving a fish skin bag from inside. The dusty pouch was unsurprisingly from a sea dwarf, evident by the disgustingly thin scales on its surface.
Evan took small breaths and reached into the slippery bag. It took him a long time to finally touch a test tube, and the rippling dark purple light emitting from it showed that the potion wasn’t fresh.
Evan didn’t care.
He crushed the cork with his teeth and swallowed the potion. With the unique tingling sensation brought by the healing potion, his eyes began to go blank.
At that moment, a book slipped out of the bag.
Evan took one glance at the book, then another.
The fish skin pouch was a gift from his hapless roommate, who mysteriously disappeared years ago. Before he disappeared, the poor guy had gone mad and would spout nonsense, screaming and hiding from things in the void that did not exist.
His baseless fear even alarmed several mid-level instructors. Those arrogant mages tried their best, but to no avail, failing to detect anything in the void. The consequence of wasting the instructor’s time was that Evan’s roommate was finally locked in a room that sealed off all access to magic and dimensions.
He was supposed to be made into some kind of special test material, but he died in that small secret room before his final execution. Apparently, after the room was opened, the walls were caked in his pale green blood and scales. He had obviously been tortured, yet nobody could find anything apart from the remnants of his corpse in that chamber.
This matter became a mystery that circulated within the bottom rungs of the mage tower. Nobody knew what had happened to him in the end. Even so, this mystery ultimately didn’t cause much of a disturbance amongst the group of apprentices, who were already walking on thin ice… although Evan knew that his instructor had nearly gone mad in his fury.
Evan later unceremoniously inherited all of his roommate’s belongings. He had tallied the things in the fish skin bag at that time, the most precious of the items were the healing potions that were long past their expiry date. Apart from that, there were a few other low-level potions, and some shells. The fine carvings on them were probably characters in the sea dwarfs’ unique language. Additionally, there were some unimportant trinkets, the book being one of them.
To be honest, even though the book was just full of all kinds of jokes and ramblings, it could be regarded as the only thing that was interesting in Evan’s roommate’s pile of junk.
Yes, that’s right…
Jokes and ramblings.
That was what Evan thought of the book’s contents…
At least before today.
The only things written in the book were instructions on how to construct a “room” in your mind, and how to “project” that “room” into an imaginary place in the starry sky.
That patch of sky was an almost indescribable thing—an area that couldn’t be rationalized through language and thought, an area where gods resided—this paragraph was far too obscure; Evan could only make a rough guess.
And if your luck was good enough… or perhaps you were truly unlucky… those gods may take notice of the “room”.
They would manifest from the void, knock on the door of the room, and walk in, answering all your questions.
And because they were beings so great and so terrifying that words could not describe them, no question would go unanswered.
However… you would never know which gods would charge a price for their answers.
“Just in case, it may be safer to prepare some sacrifices.”
In the corner of the page, the previous owner of the book, Evan’s former roommate, wrote notes. What made Evan a little uncomfortable was that the line of writing looked so meticulous. It was evident that the writer had been extremely serious and cautious at that moment.
Oh, please…
Evan heard the voice in his mind muttering again.
It was likely due to his serious injury, but Evan was a little surprised to find his thoughts focusing on the sea dwarf the whole night. Oh, yes, and the book too.
Maybe I should give it a try.
Some time later, Evan realized that it was him having those thoughts.
Wow I love the start, I hope this is a HE
Seems interesting. I was looking for something short to read. This looks good