The first thing Xiang Zainan felt was wind. Not the pressurized hiss of filtered air in a sealed laboratory. This was something raw, something untamed. It brushed against him like whispers on skin, but he had no skin to feel it with. The sensation was there, though—cold, prickling, and sharp like frost.
He opened his eyes.
Or did he?
Light flooded in from a sky that wasn't sky. It was a flat, bruised gray, tinged with sickly violet streaks that pulsed like veins in the atmosphere. There was no sun. No clouds. Just a heavy mist suspended high above, drifting like smoke from an invisible fire.
Zainan stood—or thought he did. There was ground beneath him, but it wasn't solid. It was soft, almost spongy. The color of ash. The landscape stretched on endlessly, a barren wasteland of ruin and rot. Then he saw them.
Bodies.
Dozens. Hundreds. Possibly thousands.
He stumbled back—though he had no legs to stumble with—and stared in growing horror. Corpses of animals, some familiar, others grotesquely alien, lay scattered like discarded marionettes. Some were no larger than mice; others were the size of trucks, their limbs twisted in unnatural angles, their skin flayed or decayed. Insects with glassy wings and centipede mouths, birds with too many eyes, beasts with fur and feathers and scales all at once.
Their presence should have filled the air with the stench of death. But he smelled nothing.
No. That wasn't true.
He felt something.
A pulling. A whispering weight brushing up against the hollow shape of what he had become. It was like standing in a crowd and hearing a thousand voices murmuring in languages half-remembered from nightmares.
"Where... am I?"
His voice didn't carry. It echoed only inside his head, a thought instead of a sound.
He tried to move. Not with limbs, but with intent. Like swimming through fog. His form shimmered as he drifted across the corpse-littered plain. For the first time, he caught a glimpse of himself.
A figure made of pale smoke. Humanoid, barely. His features were undefined, just a blur of suggestion—no eyes, no mouth, no skin. Just a silhouette, as though memory itself had tried to sketch him and failed to complete the drawing.
Panic surged through him.
What is this? Am I dead? Is this hell? A dream?
Memories struck like hailstones. The lab. The virus. Red Wake. His last experiment. The vial falling from his fingers. The growing weakness. The blood.
I died.
But this—this was not the afterlife he expected. There was no fire, no judgment, no tunnel of light. Just emptiness. Silence. Death.
And yet...
He could still think. Still feel.
Still be.
Was this a punishment? Or a mistake?
A sudden sound pierced the stillness—a dry, brittle crack, like ice breaking underfoot. Zainan turned. One of the nearby corpses—a deer-like creature with gnarled antlers and bulbous black eyes—shuddered.
Not with life.
With decay.
He could see it.
The decomposition wasn't random. It pulsed, almost in rhythm. Fungal threads writhed through flesh. Bacteria clustered around wounds in organized spirals. Viral spores hovered in the air like microscopic stars. He could feel them—all of them—as if they were extensions of his own awareness.
An instinct surged. He focused—not knowing how—and reached out.
The corpse responded.
A shimmer of green-black light rose from it, like smoke escaping a dying fire. The moment it touched him, a spark jolted through his form. Power. No, something more subtle. Spirituality. A strange, cold energy that clung to him, seeping inward.
He recoiled, trembling.
What the hell was that?
He turned his attention inward. The energy wasn't just power. It was knowledge. Impressions. Memories of the bacteria that had lived inside that creature. Information from the viruses it had harbored. Details he couldn't possibly know—molecular bonds, protein structures, spore patterns—all now embedded in his being.
His thoughts spiraled.
This is insane. This can't be real. Am I hallucinating? Dead? Alive?
There was no answer.
Just the wind, and the corpses, and the vast, indifferent sky.
Time passed. Or didn't. It was impossible to tell.
He drifted through the field, brushing against bodies and absorbing the essence of their death. Each one added something. Some gave knowledge—strains of disease that had evolved past the immune systems of beasts. Others gave strength—spiritual weight that made his form more stable, more defined.
Soon, he could move more easily. Think more clearly. He looked down at himself and saw fingers, now faintly visible. Not real, not flesh, but outlines. Echoes.
He stopped beside a massive carcass. A reptilian beast, maybe ten meters long, its torso split open, ribs gaping like the petals of a monstrous flower. Its organs were gone, consumed or dissolved. But its death had been recent.
He reached out.
This time, the transfer hit harder. His body flickered, spasmed. A flood of sensation and data poured into him. He reeled as memories not his own slammed into his consciousness: a sense of heat, hunger, pain, the final fevered moments of a dying predator.
Then came more.
Clusters of bacteria forming shapes in his mind—shapes he understood. Proteins that triggered fever. Enzymes that broke down cells. Viral strains with unique infection vectors.
I know these, he realized, awestruck. I've studied these. This is microbiology—but not like anything on Earth. It's more advanced. More… alive.
His fear began to morph.
Not vanish. Never vanish.
But now it shared space with curiosity.
And something darker.
Possibility.
If he could learn from death... if he could draw strength from it...
Then maybe I can survive here. Maybe I can do more than survive.
A sudden gust swept across the corpse field, and something in the distance moved. Not a corpse. Not wind. Something alive.
He froze.
Shapes. Shadows in the mist. Tall, hunched things that moved with slow, deliberate strides. They didn't look human. They didn't look like animals either. And they were getting closer.
Instinct screamed at him to flee.
But where?
This world had no horizon. Just endless death.
He floated backwards, cautious, watching the forms. They did not seem to see him—or perhaps they did not care.
He slipped behind the remains of a horned beast, its bones half-submerged in the ground. As he hovered there, another corpse nearby caught his attention. Small. Humanoid. Arms crossed over its chest, mouth agape in a final scream. Its eyes were still open.
Zainan reached out.
This time, he felt something different. Not just biology. Not just rot.
Emotion.
Fear. Grief. Resolve.
This person had died fighting. Defending something. Someone.
And even in death, a fragment of that will had remained.
It sank into him. Heavy. Warm.
And he understood.
This world wasn't just filled with corpses.
It was filled with echoes.
Not all of them were gone. Some lingered. Like him.
His panic dulled. Replaced now by a grim, focused awareness.
This is not the end.
He looked up at the sky, the endless mist churning in slow spirals above him.
This is the beginning.
And in this place of death and silence…
He would learn to live again.
Even if it meant becoming something the living would never understand.