The second I set foot outside of my cave, the being noticed me and immediately started moving. I leapt back and held my finger over the metaphorical fast travel button, ready to jump back to the temple at a moment's notice. Hopefully, this skill wouldn't have any wind-up period.

The moment I returned to my cave, the presence paused, and the attention dropped away. It started moving again seconds later, but it was enough to tell me that this cave seemed to shield me from its senses somehow. Would it also shield me from sight?

When I saw who it was, I felt like kicking myself. I should have known; Ja'yakril had told me he'd gone missing. He paused at the entrance to my cave and started looking around, tapping the walls, but somehow completely missing the entrance.

Sru'taklin, vulpes sagax

This race of intelligent monsters came about after a particularly bored draco rubrum taught their ancestors how to set things on fire, then decided that the result would be far more entertaining if they were intelligent enough to not set themselves on fire too, engaging in biomancy and animancy to boost their intelligence. This particular specimen has immense physical abilities compared to the average of the species, combined with long years of training and experience, but has no affinity with magic.

So, the warrior commander had no access to my respawn chamber. Good to know. Why the difference to the centipede though? Regardless of how this room was protected, my pet murder tree's room was not, and he had discovered my stash of equipment. That was annoying, but there was nothing I could do about it right now. I could maybe launch a surprise attack from here, but whatever protection the room had, I didn't want to risk breaking it. Silently apologising to my tree for its abandonment, I teleported back to the temple.

Apparently I'd picked a bad time, because rather than almost empty like I was used to, the temple was packed, with lines of fox-kin kneeling towards the statue. And towards me now, given that I'd appeared in front of it. The room was silent, although the fox-kin staring at me from behind a lectern set beside the statue suggested that a few seconds earlier that hadn't been the case. With a sky-blue robe, she was presumably another high-priestess.

"Oops, bad timing," I said. "Sorry for the interruption. Just ignore me, I'm only passing through."

I hurriedly fled whatever service was going on back there before anyone recovered enough to start fussing, and made my way back to the black gates, thankfully not meeting anyone other than a few green-robed priests and priestesses. I did have to wonder that if the gates led to a horrible blight and monster filled wasteland, why they were left open, but given my rush I didn't want to complain about it and made my way back down.

I didn't get very far. I could still see the light from the entrance up above when disease nullification helpfully informed me that my body was under attack, and worse, that it couldn't overcome the infection.

Disease nullification advanced to level 21

The first of my tier three skills to level up. This blight was nasty stuff indeed, and I was still near the top of the staircase. It probably got worse the deeper I went. How high would my resistance need to be to travel in safety down there?

I fired off trigger respawn and continued down. Given that I was sure to die to the blight again, I'd pick up whatever levels I could on this trip, then spend some more time on the first two floors. I had webs to collect, resistance training to do with the spider queen, and maybe, once I could face dealing with the fox-kin again, I could ask them for help dealing with the blight. Given how close they lived to it, they presumably had some way of keeping it at bay.

With the skill evolution, I safely made it to the bottom of the staircase without being overcome, but I was feeling the effect, my throat and skin itchy and my mouth dry. It had indeed got worse as I got deeper, and while the feedback from my resistance skill didn't exactly come with a countdown, I probably had a couple of hours at most. Not exactly long, but enough that trigger respawn would kick in before things got dangerous.

The staircase had come out in a small brick room, maybe four or five metres to a side, with an opening on the three other sides that lead into similar looking rooms. Alcoves were set into the walls, each of which contained a coffin, many of which were smashed or broken. Between the alcoves, torches were burning with black flames that greedily ate up the light from my shield.

Whatever soft pile I'd landed on before was gone now, but I could hear groaning in the distance. Zombies? It had been moving, after all. I could imagine a big bunch of zombies falling down the stairs and landing in a pile, taking a while to disentangle themselves.

"Give..."

I spun around towards a voice, gasping in surprise as a figure emerged from one of the adjacent rooms. It wasn't just the voice; it was the face, too. I was looking at myself. A naked, mutilated version of me, with milky white eyes, grey skin and dozens of oozing sores, leaving a trail of black fluid wherever she stepped.

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"Give... it... back..."

"Give what back?"

She stopped and looked at me properly for the first time, her face a mask of anger, despite novice empath not reacting to her at all.

"Me!" she screamed. "Me! My head, my thoughts, my soul! Give me back!"

When I'd died, all four limbs had been shattered, but whatever I was looking at had no trouble moving, nor could I see any obvious signs of broken bones. She could run, too; she charged right at me, but weakened as I was with blight, I was armed and she was not. I fended off her mad charge with my shield and stabbed with the spear.

Proficient blocker advanced to level 13

The light in the room started dropping. My shield was going out! I'd got a good attack in with my spear though, running zombie-me through the chest. Not that it seemed to phase her. I swapped my spear for my sword and tried again, chopping off first a hand, then an arm. A leg went next, and with zombie me on the floor, I could take out the head.

Blighted husk

This corpse has been infested with undead blight, reanimating and repairing it, and granting it the blight's inherent instincts to spread. This corpse was overcome by blight while still alive, and as such retains some memories and personality traits of its lifetime, making it more dangerous than the usual mindless husks.

So that creature had really been me, with at least some of my memories and personality... This adventure seemed to want to find as many ways as possible of disturbing me... It was also the first creature I'd seen with an English name. Why the difference?

The shouts of my own zombified corpse had attracted other husks in the vicinity, and I soon found myself battling to defend the stairs. My disease nullification was still losing its battle against the blight, but trigger respawn would kick in long before I started coughing my lungs up. The light of my shield continued to dim, and in a brief gap in combat, appraisal told me why.

Bryopsida illuminans (blighted)

This species of moss grows on bare rock and consumes ambient mana for sustenance, emitting the waste as a faint white glow. Consumed by many cave-dwelling grazers, the moss prevents over-grazing by dint of its considerable spreading abilities. It has highly adhesive roots, able to stick to most surfaces. This particular sample has been twisted by undead blight, reversing its elemental affinities, and causing it to darken its environment.

Probably best that I didn't bring out this shield upstairs, lest I spread the blight to the rest of the dungeon.

Oddly, I found that aside from washing out any colour, the dwindling light didn't actually affect my ability to see, and I started delimbing zombies at an ever-increasing rate. Maybe the magical darkness cast out by my blighted moss performed the same function as light? I fought on and on for what felt like hours, but couldn't have been given that I wasn't getting tired. I had to change room several times, simply because the one I was in ran out of space for all the corpses, but the supply of zombies was not endless, and eventually they all ran out.

I stood around, staring at the piles of dismembered flesh. I was seriously impressed with myself for winning that battle unharmed, but less impressed with my rewards. Even if those zombies had been weak, there were a lot of them, yet the only skill gain I'd got was the one level of blocking. Surely that epic fight had been worth a sword or dodging evolution? That was the first time I'd felt like a proper invincible protagonist.

Wait... I'd activated trigger respawn when I was still near the top of the stairs, and it had certainly been more than an hour since then. I felt for the skill, and it simply wasn't there. Something else wasn't there either; the smudges at the bottom of my vision that I'd got so used to were gone.

...I wasn't breathing, nor was my heart beating.

I attempted to summon my status, just in case, but of course nothing happened, causing me to fall to the floor laughing. How long had it been since I'd last engaged in a decent bout of insane laughter? They'd been rather sparse during my dealings with the fox-kin.

So, I was dead then. A blighted husk. It must have happened towards the start of the mass zombie fight. Succumbing to the blight while alive was one thing, but what would happen if a skill like trigger respawn cleanly plucked the soul from a body while it was still alive? While a skill like disease nullification was doing its best to protect my body from the damage the blight normally caused?

Me! That's what. I happen. I'd basically handed myself to the blight on a silver platter! A zombie whose memories of life were so perfect I hadn't even noticed I'd died!

Now that I looked at my equipment, I could see it wasn't right. Black veins ran across the back of my shield and along the length of my sword. The colour of my armour had changed to blacks and deep reds, and it had fused to my skin. All the moss of my shield was blighted, and was merged into the shield's surface rather than just stuck on. At least I didn't feel any strange urges to eat brains or kill people. And the zombies had been attacking me, which suggested they didn't see me as one of them, although that might be a bit misleading because the big fight had started while I was alive.

Actually... Now that I thought about it, what did brains taste like? Nope, naughty zombie-Katie! No thinking about eating brains! I refused to conform to zombie stereotypes.

Once I'd finally got my laughter under control, I considered my next move. I was feeling fine, aside from the whole being dead thing, so I didn't feel the need to rekill myself. It would be nice if I could offer myself a helping hand when the real me came back. I'd been intending to train with the queen for a while first, though, so it might be a few days before I came back down the stairs. Should I explore the area in the meantime? I'd lost mapping along with the rest of my skills, so I'd have to be careful not to get lost. I should probably clear away all these corpses too, because the stairs were kinda blocked off at the moment.

With one final giggle, I set about my tasks, looking forward to the look on my other face when I met myself.