As Nic moved through the woods, he saw what the lizard had meant. There was a strange sickness afflicting everything. The grass on the forest floor turned to long, azure-blue blades of glass, and Nic had to step carefully to avoid crushing them to jagged shards under his bare feet. The moss staining the tree trunks had been transformed into dripping pustules of red, as if the tree was bleeding from some strange disease.

One tree had been turned to a massive pillar of white salt, steadily losing shape as a light rain came down and each pattering droplet dissolved a tiny portion of the bark. Caught half-melting, it looked like a curled, skeletal hand.

The first creature Nic saw was a stag, lying on the ground, it eyes wide with terror. Its belly had burst open as jagged spears of garnet stone emerged from its chest cavity, stabbing out into the air. More were forming in its mouth as it panicked, unable to move, a thin froth of saliva clinging to its lips.

Nic hesitated for a moment before drawing his greatsword, stone from the earth surrounding its hilt.

The beast closed its eyes and Nic beheaded it with a single stroke.

Things only grew worse.

The deeper he went into the forest, the more he found similar creations, similar experiments. There were birds that were frozen in the trees, made of a substance like wax that smelled of grease and fat. A dying boar, speared through the middle by crawling vines tipped by razor-sharp metal leaves. That one nearly caught Nic as well, when he approached to do the merciful thing and was instantly attacked by the vines.

They shot forward, slashing at his face and arms. He took three steps back, blood dripping into his eyes, and spat out a cloud of Primordial Mist. Everything within lost its color and slowly crumbled to ash.

Except for a small, flickering mote of light. It was so thin it could have been a trick of his eyes, but Nic saw that light form into an Aleph mark for a second before vanishing.

He scowled.

So this really was… What? Someone who followed the same path...

One of the Heretics that Sofia had tried to send him out hunting? It made sense. They were captured within the Inquisitor’s soul vial when the nuclear fire had enveloped him. If they survived, being ghosts already, maybe some of the power that had marked his skin had flowed into them as well.

He continued forward.

At some point there was no longer a forest. Blue, vein-like tissues of metal spread across the ground. The trees were no longer recognizable, unfolding into flowers or flesh or jewels. Everything was sickly, halfway transformed into something else.

The animals seemed conscious of every moment of their transformation. That was the worst part.

But as he reached the center, the earth dropped away. A squirming pit of colors writhed instead, alive, pulsating. One thing morphed into another, until Nic could no longer tell what he was seeing. The moment where one material blurred into the next was obscured and only the constant change, the spiralling sickness, remained.

Nic drew a spore-lob grenade from his bag and flung it into the pit. It vanished into the sucking mire of flesh and countless other things, and when the detonation rang out, everything shuddered and convulsed. A wash of unnameable fluids poured from the cavern mouth.

As Nic stepped back, his danger sense screamed a warning.

A misty streak of power shot out and aimed for his heart, but Nic raised his greatsword, deflecting it away.

The beam shot sideways and landed, dissolving into mist then reforming as the blurred silhouette of a man. He had an ape-like, hunched demeanor, and the stature of a goblin with long ears and a flattened nose.

Nic opened the senses he shared with Sofia, but instead of a steady flow of information, garbled nonsense spread across his vision in jagged squirms of writing. The man was distorting the Sophont’s archives simply by existing.

The same way Lavhin’s failed experiments had.

“Urgh-” Nic felt a mental feedback, a rising note of pain searing through his skull. Somewhere in the background, Nic could tell Sofia was trying to speak, but all that reached him was garbled whispers fading in and out of focus.

The goblinoid chuckled. “I see, I see.” It ran its tongue over stubby and broken teeth. “You have the same corruption in you, child.”

Even though its body was made of mist, that strike had been very solid. Nic still felt the numbness in his arms from blocking that one blow. So he wasn’t exactly eager to fight until he had some idea of what he was fighting.

Blocking out the flow of knowledge, Nic recovered and croaked out…

"What are you?"

Inkspur was on his shoulder, calling out the question.

"A hungry spirit, of course. But a spirit who remembers his name. The Inquisitor only kept me for, oh, a few decades. Not as much time as those old sinners..." But clearly long enough. The creature was having trouble speaking clearly, forgetting vital context.

Nic had to piece it together.

"You were a Heretic." He said. "And now..."

"Heretic? I worked in mathematics! Trying to calculate, oh, the depths of the System, trying to glimpse how it thought, why it thought..." The ghost shivered and its body of mist blurred for a moment. When it reformed it had shifted closer to Nic, moving across the ground in a knuckle-walk. "My poor little head could barely hold such lofty things."

"Right..." Nic stepped back carefully. Considering what the goblinoid had done to everything it had crossed paths with, he wasn't so quick to believe that it had 'just' been playing innocently with mathematics...

Not that Nic trusted math to begin with.

"What was your Heresy, friend? Share your woes little pink one..." The goblin stopped advancing as suddenly as it had begun, staring up at him.

"I'm just really hard to get along with. In fact, I don't think we can be friends..."

"What? Why? But- we walk the same path." The creature's ears twitched downwards. It held out a hand to Nic, and cupped between its indistinct fingers a glyph began to burn into existence. The sign of the Aleph. "Something new." The goblin said, breathing the words out with an air of childish wonder.

Nic...

Nic's moral self wanted to cut this creature in half for all the innocents it had torture. His better sense told him this would be a hard fight...

But his curiosity, and his will towards power, wanted to know *how.* How had the goblinoid used the Aleph this way?

"What is it?" He asked, finally stepping forward. His guard lowered by a fraction, not because he trusted the erratic fool in front of him, but because it was harder to get good answers at swordpoint.

"Creation-by-destruction. Freedom from form, the life unbound. It unmakes and rethreads things..." The goblin chuckled.

"And why use it to do..." The stone point of Nic's greatsword swung to point at the pit, which still writhed and surged in the background. "That?"

The goblin tilted his head aside. "To create a body. Yes, I have to be reborn, if I'm to finish my work. You know..." His smile twitched, becoming ever-so-slightly brittle. "I'm beginning to realize you're quite dull-witted. That skin of yours is the most interesting thing about you..."

Nic didn't need his danger sense to warn him of what was about to happen.

Gwungo melted down from his shoulder, becoming a veil of crystalline blue silver that surrounded his skin.

His blade shot up, stabbing through the air as the goblin turned into a mist-cloaked blur and shot for his throat. In a moment of decision, Nic chose not to block, only counter. The goblin’s claw reached for his neck and his stone blade pierced for the ghost’s chest.

He was betting everything on his new strength, his new regeneration, being enough to walk away from a single blow. On the ghost with its fragile form being left worse off than him.

The two attacks struck out simultaneously.

Nic was hurled back into a tree, the oaken trunk half-turned to slithering protrusions of slimy tendrils like an anemone’s poison nest. The ghost howled, pierced through the chest, flying backwards through the air and reforming in a miserable state.

It could no longer fully hold its shape. Limbs drifted off into ribbons of mist, its face faded in and out of focus. Nic’s aura had destroyed much of its body, burning through its center.

“Foul ingrate…”

Nic didn’t say anything.

He didn’t have a throat, for the moment.

Unable to breath, he couldn’t put any cultivation behind his blows, but he still forced his body to advance. Every step felt as heavy as carrying the earth on his back, but he charged forward and swung the earth-blade in a massive sweep. The better Nic disguised his weakness the more time he would have to heal from it.

The ghost flickered back, turning into a misty ray and shooting towards cover where several mossy roots formed a hill. Nic was moments behind, his blade crashing down into the roots, cutting chips of wood free in a great hammering arc.

By then the ghost was gone.

The frantic leaps and flickering movement was almost impossible to follow, but Nic just bared his bloody smile, determined to give chase. This must be what it felt like facing him. With every stride strength poured back into his body as his throat sealed over with a white scar, and the power of his blows built until his blade could barely be seen.

The ghost was here-

-there-

-anywhere it could be to escape.

But it hadn’t directly left the glade. It was guarding something here, and Nic knew what.

He feinted forward, let the ghost blur off into a streak of mist, and then pivoted hard on his right leg. Dragging his aura into his throat, he sprayed a great whirling blade of Primordial Mist down into the pit where the old goblin was trying to grow a new body.

The impossible, virile ugliness of the depths, where flesh turned to feathers to metal to jewels to flesh again, began to shake. The mist was like a poison, turning all it touched into ash- and not even the power within could turn that grey dust back to life again.

The goblin howled.

Instantly it turned into a ray that shot for Nic, materializing in a wild leap above him with a three-fingered claw striking down. Within that claw was the Aleph, a burning symbol like a brand. Nic’s blade snapped up and easily severed the ghost in two, carving from hip to shoulder and cutting away the offending arm.

What he didn’t expect was that the arm would continue to strike, like a serpent’s severed head lunging even in death.

It slammed into his chest, knocking him back, and the Aleph burned on the surface of his skin. For a moment Nic could feel its poison energy reaching into him, his cells beginning to respond, to twist.

“Ooh. I know this one!”

Then Gwungo surged forward in a dozen reaching hands like a hungry octopus, curling around the symbol. It was pulled into his mass and simply dissipated, the energy flooding out in strands. Gwungo let out a happy little burbling sound as the ripples faded away.

In front of Nic, the ghost’s face hung, the rest of its body slowly unraveling.

“Ahhh.” The ghost’s voice had a more lucid quality now, as if encountering death had sobered up its scattered mind. “I see my mistake. You were mocking me…”

“You had already succeeded. Junior can only bow, and laugh at oblivion…”