The world in front of him bled away into black, and this time he was fully awake for it.
That made the difference. He understood now what the hunting grounds actually were, not dreams, not unconsciousness.
His body remained exactly where it was, in his room at the base, lying on the bed.
But his mind had passed through some channel that didn't have a name yet, into something layered underneath the waking world.
Drip.
A bead of dirty water fell from the ceiling and hit the floor. The sound of it brought his eyes open.
Grey light. A long corridor stretching in both directions, lined on either side with cells, identical dimensions, evenly spaced, running out past the point where the light could follow them.
The silence here was the particular kind that had weight to it, punctuated only by the metronomic tick of a clock somewhere out of sight.
The bulbs along the ceiling were old. They swayed faintly and stuttered, the damaged filaments throwing small sparks at irregular intervals.
The air was cold and damp and carried the smell of mold and standing water, the chill of it finding his joints like something with intent.
"Different."
The First Hunting Ground had been open wasteland. This was an endless prison.
"Of course it is." He moved along the corridor. "Sinners' ground."
He hadn't walked far when he found Jason Lance.
"Thank God. You're actually dead."
He stopped in front of the cell and looked in. The man curled in the corner was stripped of everything, his robes, his staff, the Lv4 authority he'd carried, all of it gone.
What remained was thin and pale and diminished, hunched against the wall with his knees drawn up, looking like something that had already been here too long.
"So this is what you actually look like. The soul, I mean."
Jason's head snapped up. Whatever dignity he'd maintained in life found no purchase here, he crossed the cell in two steps and grabbed the bars with both hands, his voice scraped raw.
"I'm dead. I shouldn't be here, this isn't where I'm supposed to go, you have to understand, I should be in hell, I should be anywhere else, please, get me out, I'm begging you."
Raphael raised an eyebrow.
"You're frightened of this place." He said it with mild interest. "More frightened than you were of dying. What's down here that's worse than that?"
Jason's eyes went to the far end of the corridor on pure reflex. They snapped back just as fast. He shook his head, hard, repeatedly, the motion frantic.
"I can't say it. I can't say it. That thing, that thing down there."
His eyes went glassy. He started hitting his forehead against the bars in a slow, rhythmic motion, sobbing, asking Raphael to just kill him, just end it, just make it stop.
The behavior pulled at a memory, the First Hunting Ground, the end of the wasteland where the earth had begun to crack and something massive had been pushing upward through the soil.
Something that had radiated hostility from a distance.
Maybe the same class of thing. Maybe worse.
He didn't intend to find out today.
Raphael stepped back and looked around the corridor. No other figures. The undead he'd killed weren't here, by classification, they likely sorted into the First Hunting Ground.
He caught his reflection in a pool of dirty water on the floor and took a moment to look at it.
Same black as usual, but the outfit had changed. A long coat, cut in the style of a senior prison warden, the edges traced in gilt, ranking marks, he suspected, that corresponded to something in this place's internal logic.
He looked at the placard mounted beside Jason's cell.
[Low-level Prisoner: Jason Lance.]
[Level: 4.]
[Information: Flesh Bishop.]
[Cardinal Sin: Gluttony.]
[Sin: 140.]
[Mutation Skills: 10.]
[Soul Integrity: 100%.]
Below the information, two translucent buttons.
[Imprison] and [Execute].
[Imprison: Dominate a portion of abilities and Sin through torment of the soul.]
[Domination based on Cardinal Sin compatibility.]
[Gluttony affinity: 20%.]
[Skills available for domination: 2.]
[Sin available for domination: 28.]
"Twenty percent." He studied it. "Skills and Sin both capped at twenty."
He turned the number over.
Gluttony affinity: 20%. Which meant roughly a fifth of his own nature leaned in that direction — not appetite in the literal sense, almost certainly.
The theological Gluttony, the philosophical one. Excess. Consumption as compulsion. Taking more than the present moment called for.
He filed the thought away for later. Evelyn had read enough church doctrine to explain it properly, she was the obvious person to ask.
He looked at the second option.
[Execute: Inherit Cardinal Sin and full Sin through annihilation of the soul.]
[Full Sin: 140.]
[Permanently inherit mutation skills: 2.]
[Gluttony affinity will increase.]
He thought through the logic of both.
Imprison meant flexible access, call on twenty percent of Jason's skills when the situation warranted, with the sin domination to match. The ceiling was low.
Enough to push him toward Level 2, nothing beyond that. The cost was maintaining the soul intact, which meant the torment had to be ongoing rather than terminal.
Execute was permanent inheritance. Every skill, all the Sin, no maintenance required. The tradeoff was finality, once chosen, nothing could be revisited or revised.
The problem with Execute was that he'd barely scratched the surface of what a Flesh Bishop could actually do. He'd survived the encounter; he hadn't studied it.
Committing permanently to a skill set he didn't understand yet was the kind of decision that came back badly.
But the more he looked at the two buttons, the simpler the choice became.
"Actually, this isn't hard at all."
He looked at Jason through the bars. Jason had stopped hitting his head against them and was watching him with the expression of a man who had begun to understand that the person outside the cell was not going to be an ally.
Raphael leaned slightly closer. When he spoke, his voice was low and even.
"I'm going to keep you here. I'm going to use your abilities when I need them, and I'm going to make sure your soul stays intact long enough to feel every second of it. No rest. No resolution.
Just this place, and whatever's at the end of that corridor, for as long as it takes for you to dissolve."
He straightened up.
"Confess your sins to the walls. No one's going to absolve you."
His finger pressed the Imprison button.
From deep in the corridor, something stirred.
A sound first, low and reverberant, the kind of sound that arrived in the chest before the ears processed it.
Then the dragging: heavy chain links scraping across stone in a slow, patient rhythm.
Accompanied by breathing that was too large, too deliberate, exhaling in long intervals like something conserving effort over a very long walk.
It was getting closer.
Jason's face collapsed. He pressed himself against the back wall of the cell and stared past the bars at the corridor, his mouth working soundlessly.
Raphael's form had already dissolved from the spot where he'd been standing.
"Hh..."
He sat up hard.
Every exit from the hunting grounds came with the same sensation, a moment of genuine suffocation, the feeling of water closing over the head right before the surface broke. He sat on the edge of the bed and breathed through it.
Then the new power found him.
It came in through the bloodstream, or something that moved like the bloodstream, spreading outward from the center of him through every channel his body had.
His muscles swelled against his skin in a long, involuntary contraction. Something crawled under the surface, not painful, just deeply present, rewriting things.
Every pore opened at once. Black fluid pushed through the skin in a thin sheen, the byproduct of whatever the mutation was burning away in the process of rebuilding.
His face went white. Red climbed the whites of his eyes from the outside in.
Arcane energy, more of it than he'd ever held, the difference between his original reserves and this staggering. The old quantity had been a candle.
This was something you couldn't cup your hands around.
[Sin acquired: +28.]
[Current Sin: 40.3 / 40.]
[Mutation in progress.]
[Mutation complete.]
[Current Level: 2.]