The white light didn't fade; it solidified, turning from a blinding glare into a suffocating physical weight.
It felt like being pressed slowly between two massive sheets of freezing glass. I tried to gasp, to draw in a single breath of relief, but my lungs were non-existent—merely a memory of a biological function. I was a flickering ghost, reduced to a core of raw, terrified awareness floating in a pressurized void.
"Gently now," Liana's voice echoed, sounding like it was being filtered through deep water.
She was hovering above me, her face distorted by the thick, curved glass of her silver pocket watch. Through the magnifying lens, her violet eye looked like a planet-sized orb of predatory hunger, tracking every twitch of my fading essence.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The sound was no longer coming from the outside world. It was vibrating inside my soul, a rhythmic hammer strike against my very consciousness.
[STATUS: HARVESTING IN PROGRESS]
[STABILITY: 32%]
[EXISTENCE DECAY RATE: +200%]
"What are you doing?" I tried to scream, but my thoughts were being pulled toward the open watch like iron filings to a powerful magnet.
Liana sat on the edge of a cold, black stone slab, her white robes draped over the edge like spilled milk. Beside her, the Craftmaster stood motionless, his heavy gray cloak absorbing the dim light. His internal brass gears whirred with a low, mournful hum that set my teeth on edge.
"I'm keeping you fresh, Kyle," Liana whispered, her voice a seductive caress of madness.
She opened the ornate back of the watch with a sharp click. I saw it then—the truth behind her "miracles." It wasn't clockwork or springs inside the casing. It was a mass of writhing, translucent tentacles made of solidified, corrupted mana, pulsing with a sickly light.
One of the tentacles reached out, its tip glowing with a violet spark. It touched the silver dust on my ghostly chest.
"Agh!"
An agonizing heat surged through my center. It wasn't the searing heat of a physical fire; it was the metaphysical heat of being eaten alive. I could feel my most precious memories—the crisp smell of autumn rain, the warm taste of freshly baked bread, the gentle, melodic sound of my mother's voice—being systematically siphoned away, pulled into the watch's hungry Maw.
"The twelfth is particularly sweet," Liana sighed, her eyes fluttering closed in a moment of sheer sensory bliss.
She leaned down, her lips brushing the cold glass of the watch face as if she were kissing my very forehead.
"You always were the most selfless of the batch, weren't you? That's why your mana tastes so incredibly pure. Even in the middle of your own death, you were trying to protect me. It's delicious."
I looked at the watch face through the haze of my agony. The hands weren't counting seconds or minutes anymore. They were counting me.
Every sharp tick of the needle corresponded to a visible drop in my stability. The watch was a parasite, a spiritual tick. It wasn't just tracking my disappearance; it was actively accelerating the process to fuel the dark miracles of the woman I had worshipped.
"You're... killing me," I managed to think, the concept of speech becoming a distant dream.
Liana's expression shifted instantly. For a single, terrifying second, her mask of saintly devotion cracked wide open. A flash of genuine, jagged irritation crossed her beautiful features, revealing the monster beneath the porcelain.
"Killing you?" she hissed, her voice dropping an octave.
She grabbed the empty air where my neck should be. The silver dust flared violently under her touch, burning with a cold, blue light.
"I am preserving you! Without me, your soul would have vanished into the gray void the very moment Zion struck his blow. I am the only reason you still have a 'self' to suffer with! I am your savior, Kyle! Don't you ever forget that!"
She held the watch closer to her face, and I could see the etched numbers on the inner rim glowing with a faint, stolen light.
[LIFE-FORCE HARVESTED: 1,400 UNITS]
[CURRENT USER BUFF: 'SAINTESS'S ETERNAL YOUTH']
The suspicion that had been rotting in the back of my mind was finally confirmed. She didn't just want my company. She was using my slow, agonizing erasure as a battery to maintain her own divinity and her timeless beauty.
I was nothing more than high-grade fuel.
"Craftmaster," Liana snapped, not taking her predatory eyes off my flickering form. "Is the vessel attuned? He is losing coherence faster than my watch can compensate for. I won't have him leaking out into the air."
The Craftmaster stepped forward, his heavy boots grinding the ritual chalk into dust. He pointed a thick, soot-stained finger at a long, rectangular wooden box resting in the corner of the workshop.
"The Body of the Iron Woods is ready," he grunted, his voice like stones in a blender. "But be warned, Saintess. It is a silent vessel. It has no tongue to speak. It has no eyes of its own to see the sun. He will be a passenger in a wooden puppet, felt but never heard."
Liana smiled, a look of serene, terrifying contentment. "Perfect. He doesn't need to see the world or talk to anyone else. He only needs to feel me. He only needs to focus on his love for me."
She stood up and began the final, heavy incantation. The indigo light from the previous ritual churned, turning a bruised, violent purple that seemed to suck the oxygen out of the room.
"Wait," I struggled against the relentless pull of the watch's tentacles. "If I'm the twelfth... what happened to the others? Where are the eleven before me?"
Liana paused, her chant hanging in the air. She looked down at the eleven scratches etched inside the watch lid with a distant, bored expression.
"They stopped being fun," she said simply, her voice devoid of any emotion.
She turned the watch dial with a sharp twist.
The suction increased tenfold. My vision began to tear at the seams. The workshop, the towering Craftmaster, and Liana's beautiful, murderous face dissolved into a swirling whirlpool of silver needles and violet shadows.
[STABILITY: 15%]
[INITIATING SOUL TRANSFERENCE...]
[TARGET: VESSEL #12]
I felt a sudden, crushing weight—the return of gravity, but it felt wrong.
Cold, hard wood pressed against my back and the back of my skull. The thick, cloying smell of cedar and old, damp earth filled my nose. I tried to move my hand, to lift it in protest, but it felt like trying to lift a mountain of lead with a single thread.
I opened my eyes—or rather, the vessel's carved glass eyes clicked open.
The world was a grainy, muffled mess of gray and shadow. I was lying in the darkness of the box, my new body rigid and unresponsive.
Liana leaned over the edge of the box, her face framed by the dim light of the workshop. She reached in and stroked my new, wooden cheek with a feather-light touch. Her fingers were no longer cold. Through this artificial, sensitive wood, her touch felt like molten lead searing into my nerves.
"Welcome back, Kyle," she whispered, her voice echoing in the hollow chamber of my new chest.
She leaned in closer, her long hair falling around my wooden face like a silken shroud, cutting off what little light remained.
"Now, tell me," she smiled, her voice dripping with a sickeningly sweet, lethal poison. "Do you still love me? Or do I need to start the preparations for number thirteen?"
[STABILITY: 10% (CRITICAL)]
[NEW TRAIT ACQUIRED: 'PUPPET'S AGONY']
Suddenly, the heavy workshop door was kicked open with a thunderous boom.
A familiar, arrogant voice echoed through the stone room, shattering the intimate horror of the moment.
"Liana? What in the gods' names is this place? And why is there a corpse in a box in the middle of an S-rank ruin?"
Zion stood in the doorway, his golden sword drawn and glowing with a faint, suspicious light.
Liana didn't move. She didn't even look back at the Hero. She just kept staring into my frozen, wooden eyes, her finger tracing a slow, agonizing line down the grain of my throat.
"He's not a corpse, Zion," she said softly, her voice returning to its perfect, saintly timbre.
She finally looked back at the Hero, and her eyes were as empty as the void I had just escaped.
"He's our new luggage carrier. A gift from the ruins."
[REMAINING TIME UNTIL SOUL REJECTION: 12 HOURS]
[ALERT: ZION HAS DETECTED A MALIGNANT MANA SIGNATURE]