When I finally regained my senses after the painful nonsense of the emergency protocol, the first thing I felt was the flesh wrapping around me as if it were a second layer of skin.
The next sensation was pain. An intense pain that spread across practically my entire body, coming from dozens of different points at the same time.
I registered it almost by instinct, for although the feeling was there, it was not the completely heartbreaking type of pain I had experienced just a moment ago; it was more like the recognition that something was wrong in my physical being rather than actual agony.
That mass of bleeding and aching flesh was now my [Material Body]. I understood it perfectly, yet the sensation still felt strange to me in more ways than one.
I slowly opened my eyes while trying to get used to a reality that once again possessed weight, temperature, and direction, as well as the bunch of things I didn't bother to mention but that were just as important for its functioning.
Darkness dominated the place, though not completely. Some faint light source managed to filter in from a spot I couldn't immediately identify, allowing me to vaguely distinguish the contours of a room.
I tried to sit up, pressing a hand against the floor. Something damp clung to my fingers. Upon lifting my hand, I discovered a dark mixture of blood and a sweet liquid, possibly wine or some alcohol with a high sugar content, covering part of my palm. I observed it for a few seconds before scanning the rest of the place with my gaze. A room small enough and easily recognizable in broad terms as a fairly common American basement, albeit with clear differences:
Broken bottles, many of them.
Some remained whole but were placed randomly in a disorganized manner, but most were shattered into pieces around where I had awakened. Shards of glass covered much of the floor, and several remained embedded in my arms, legs, and sides.
That explained the unpleasant sensation running through practically my entire body.
From what I could observe with a superficial examination of the body, many of the wounds had already stopped bleeding, though others remained open, slowly oozing blood like a damaged faucet. One especially nasty wound in the shape of a cut on the head sent a constant trickle of blood down the side of my face every time I moved, or at least that would have happened if I were still human.
I was not.
During the process of [Possessing], the difference between the spiritual body and the material body seemed to have become little more than a formality. Flesh was still flesh and energy was still energy, but both were so deeply superimposed that trying to distinguish them individually was as absurd as pointing out where a drop of ink ended after falling into the ocean.
I simply knew all of that. In the same way I knew what a Magicule was or how to move wings I had never possessed before. Knowledge that remained in some corner of my mind like a strange, distorted version of instinct. It had always been there; it was just that until now, I hadn't bothered to pay attention to it.
So this time, I did pay attention. I watched as one of the glass fragments embedded in my forearm began to slowly loosen. The wound opened just a bit wider as the glass finished sliding out on its own, falling to the floor with a soft splash.
What emerged from behind it was not exactly blood. At least not human blood.
A reddish liquid mixed with a thick, almost transparent green substance began to well up from inside the wound before the flesh itself seemed to come alive. Fine filaments resembling young roots emerged from the cut, stretching out to find the opposite edge of the injury.
Upon meeting, they intertwined with one another.
The opening rapidly vanished as the fibers retracted, and the skin closed over them again as if the wound had never existed.
The same process began to repeat all over my body.
Shards of broken glass were expelled one after another while small vines, colored somewhere between green and violet, ran through the interior of the lesions, reconstructing muscles, blood vessels, and skin with an unsettling precision that felt strangely familiar, despite rationally knowing it was the first time I had ever experienced such a thing. Some wounds took mere seconds. Others required a bit more time due to the depth of the cuts.
When everything ended, the only thing left of the wounds was the blood already spilled on my clothes and the floor. Not even scars remained.
This meant I no longer had that dizziness issue holding me against the floor like an invalid, whether it was the product of blood loss, drunkenness, or a particularly unfortunate mixture of both.
So I stood up.
The movement proved much easier than expected.
For a moment I stood motionless, checking if my legs truly intended to support me. They did so without much protest. My balance was still strange, though I suspected that had more to do with the previous state of this body than my own.
My gaze swept across the basement once more.
From the floor, the scene had seemed chaotic.
Standing up, it looked much worse.
The broken bottles were not simply scattered everywhere. There was a pattern. A clumsy and uneven one, but deliberate nonetheless. The shards of glass formed an irregular circle around the spot where I had awakened, as if someone had tried to construct a particularly depressing version of a magic circle using nothing but cheap alcohol and an inordinate amount of bad decisions.
My eyes followed the contours of the design.
Symbols; dozens of them crowded together, some barely deformed smudges while others seemed to have been traced with a much clearer intention, yet deeply unhinged by something I couldn't quite pinpoint.
But most of them represented something I recognized after blinking a couple of times.
Eyes.
Goat eyes.
A worrying number of goat eyes drawn while a series of weeds grew between the concrete, the wood, or whatever surface those demonic symbols had been placed upon.
I frowned slightly as I stepped closer to one of them, with a new series of vague memories rapidly blossoming from this body of mine.
The color was difficult to distinguish under that miserable illumination. Some parts looked like blood. Others looked like wine. Probably both.
Then I looked at my hands, more specifically my index and middle fingers.
The skin around them was much more stained than the rest of my hands, a much deeper red and visibly dry by comparison.
As if they had been used repeatedly to drag liquid across stone, wood, and any surface they could reach.
I looked at the symbols. Then at my fingers. Then at the symbols again.
The conclusion was quite evident now that the frankly fuzzy memories of this body became clearer within the few scraps of coherent information passing through its mind.
"Well... that explains a few things."
I didn't remember drawing any of it. At least not the way one normally remembers something.
What appeared were fragments: a bottle smashing against the floor. A laugh. Another bottle. The feeling of crying while trying to laugh at the same time. Fingers dragging a mixture of blood and alcohol across the stone.
Symbols traced over and over again until they stopped looking like symbols and became an obsession.
Nothing particularly coherent.
But enough to understand several things.
The one responsible for all this and I shared much more than just a body.
Occupying the body of a parallel version of myself was strange, yes. But after dying, existing for an impossible amount of time inside an imaginary world, becoming a daemon, and surviving what was essentially a way of dying all over again, this wasn't as worrying as one might expect.
In any case, existential dilemmas about parallel universes could wait. Finding out where the hell I was turned out to be far more urgent than a philosophical discussion that wasn't going to resolve absolutely anything.