After the end of the first day, Logan expected one of two things to happen. Either he would gain magical powers and lead a rebellion to freedom, or they would gradually starve to death and be recruited into the skeleton army for all eternity.

Neither of those two things happened. Instead, a new skeleton walked down the stairs on the following morning. It wore a discoloured robe and carried a crystal tray laden with molten orange potions. They were the same ones that had been administered the day before, each dose stored in a vial made of crystal.

The robed skeleton would then go from person to person, handing the potions out and waiting until they drank the fluid. Logan had done so with little hesitation. The vial itself was warm to the touch, and the golden liquid shimmered in an eye-catching way. He half expected it to burn on the way down, but it was pleasantly warm and flavourless, almost like a bad cup of tea.

Sadly, he didn’t awaken any magical powers after consuming it. The liquid warmed him up quite a bit and even filled his stomach for the rest of the day, but that was about it. Amelia also drank her vial after he explained that it was a replacement for food. Tom didn’t listen, his emotions running high. He was indignant and furious, even telling the robed skeleton to go shove the vial up its bony ass.

A few people called out their encouragement, but he regretted his decision after the robed skeleton stopped moving. A few minutes later, they all figured out why it had become frozen in place.

It was waiting.

Two heavily armoured skeleton knights came down the stairs. They wore a full suit of armour that wasn’t rusted or damaged in any way that Logan could see. Their kit was of impeccable quality. It had even been polished recently, their swords also well-oiled judging by the way they gleamed in the pale blue torchlight.

They approached Tom and unsheathed their swords. He immediately downed the vial at that point, causing them to stop moving. A moment later, they walked over to the mouth of the stairwell and stood on either side of the door.

The threat of violence wasn’t really necessary. Hunger would’ve changed Tom’s mind after a few more days. Then again, it made him capitulate immediately rather than mess up their plans, whatever they may be.

Nearly everyone acquiesced after that, including most of the new people who had arrived throughout the night. The fifth and final member of Amelia’s group had been revived while he was asleep. Logan had woken up at the noise of her getting dragged in before quickly falling back asleep.

It was another woman named Stephanie. She had shoulder-length blonde hair and blue eyes, and her skin was freckled and tanned from the sun. Amelia explained that she was a surfer. He could’ve talked to her the following day, but as he was an acquaintance and she was too far away for him not to shout, he mostly spoke with Amelia.

Of course, she wasn’t the last corpse to get dragged in throughout the night. The mountain had collapsed and fallen into the abyss, or perhaps even the entire mountain range. The leather skeleton and the knight hauled in many corpses, reviving them again and again until sixteen cells were inhabited by the time Logan woke up on the first morning.

That included himself and Amelia’s group of five.

After Tom gave in and drank the vial, an older woman named Janet remained steadfast in her decision to rebel. She refused to drink the fluid when it was her turn, outright demanding to be let out of this ‘silly game’ or she would sue. There was simply no talking to her. She thought this was some kind of prank on a reality TV show, not a life-threatening prison run by the undead.

It didn’t help that she was the last person to be revived, meaning she hadn’t witnessed anyone being brought back to life or even seen a skeleton until that point. In her mind, all she remembered was the mountain rumbling before she suddenly woke up in what should’ve been a tourist attraction.

It was no wonder she believed they were in a game show, but the robed skeleton didn’t know or care what she thought. It simply held out the vial for her to drink. She ignored it, of course, and instead chose to berate the robed skeleton as if it were a teenager working at a fast-food restaurant.

She even demanded that they take off their ‘silly costume’ because it was disrespectful to talk to her while dressed like that.

Logan didn’t understand until he remembered what the skeleton was dressed in. The hood of its robe was pulled up over its skull, and the hem was so long it dragged on the ground, covering its entire body. Only its hands and face were exposed, making it easy to think it was a skinny teenager wearing a costume.

Little did she know, however, that the undead was very real.

The two knights walked over from where they had been standing by the stairs and threw the woman against the wall. They held her down and sliced her stomach open, even going so far as to pour the potion in. Most didn’t see the event in question, but they certainly heard the screaming and the sound of flesh being parted.

Thankfully for Janet, she fainted a second after being attacked. The potion activated a moment later and healed her wounds, leaving her to sleep on the floor.

“Shit,” Tom muttered, his hands shaking before he gripped the bars.

He had obviously realised that could’ve been him.

“They really are monsters,” Amelia whispered.

Everyone hoped for things to calm down after that, but their wishes were not answered. The next morning, someone woke up sick. One of the middle-aged hikers in Janet’s group had developed a temperature. He was sweating and shivering for hours, even going so far as to sleep against the bars to be as close to an ice torch as possible.

It appeared that the placement of the ice torches between each cell was intentional. They helped cool the man down, allowing him to stay conscious as his condition worsened over the next few hours. They hoped he would improve, but the veins in his shoulders began to glow with orange light. It was like his blood was full of luminescent dye, and if that wasn’t bad enough, the disease was spreading around the rest of his body.

It was growing noticeably larger by the hour.

When the robed skeleton visited the next morning to give them their daily potion, Logan hoped that drinking it would fix the man’s condition. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect. His veins grew brighter as they took over more than half of his body, the light fading after a minute or so. He lasted a bit more than a day until his entire circulatory system began to glow.

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No one knew what would happen to him until the entire prison block lit up with orange light.

Logan trembled and woke up from his meditations as someone shrieked. He couldn’t see what was happening, but the eruption of light and dancing shadows made it obvious. The man was on fire. He screamed for a few more seconds before going silent, his body thudding against the stone floor.

The fire died out soon after that. The smell of burning flesh, however, did not go away.

“What happened?” Logan said, turning to Amelia. The man’s cell was on his side, meaning she might’ve been able to see something.

Her face was pale in the blue light of the torches. “He- He spontaneously combusted.”

Logan couldn’t stop himself from biting his lip. There was a slight hope that he could be revived with the potion, but the robed skeleton didn’t even appear. Five minutes after the man spontaneously burst into flames, the leather skeleton arrived and hauled the corpse away, never to be seen again.

He was dead, and it seemed that even a revival potion couldn’t save him. Or maybe the potion caused his death in the first place. A medicine that could raise the dead was something that shouldn’t be possible. The fact that it had side effects was no surprise, really. This was something that Logan had thought of before. He would’ve discussed it with the others, but there was no point besides scaring everyone. The following days only supported his decision to keep quiet.

The looming omen of death shocked Logan into a furore. He ignored everyone and redoubled his efforts, spending nearly every waking moment studying the Goddess in the painting. If there was a path to surviving the side effects of a magical potion, it could only be found in something that was of a similar nature.

All the while, people were getting sicker. By the end of the week, two more had to be forced to drink the potion. One had their jaw broken while the other was held down and forced to swallow. They both had glowing veins throughout more than half their body, so it was understandable why they refused.

Who the hell wanted to burn to death?

Their desire to live did nothing to save them, though. They both died on the seventh day of their captivity, three more passing away over the next two days. None of them were from Amelia’s group. As such, Logan figured that their ages were likely a contributing factor.

Amelia’s group was made up of people who all went to college together, all of them in their early twenties at most. As for the other two groups, they both came from the same church-led hiking event called Sermon with a View. The idea was that they would hike up to a lookout to enjoy nature as God intended. They would also listen to a sermon while overlooking the world He created.

On the ninth day, another person died. Only this time, it wasn’t one of the middle-aged hikers. Melissa had developed glowing veins in the middle of the week, just like almost everyone else. The only difference was that she and the younger people were more resistant to the infection, if it could even be called that.

She had been optimistic about it at first, but as her condition progressed, James became more erratic until Melissa eventually fell into a coma. Logan and the rest of Amelia’s group told him to close his eyes and block his ears when the inevitable happened. Thankfully, he had followed their advice. Now he just sat listlessly against the bars to cool down, his own temperature increasing by the minute.

“We were going to climb Mount Everest one day,” James whispered, his voice hoarse.

No one spoke. How could they when nearly everyone had developed a temperature? Everyone except for Logan, that was. He had no idea why he was still okay. The only explanation he could come up with was related to the painting, but as far as he was aware, it did nothing besides improve his mental capabilities.

The other idea he had been toying with was that he had been dead for the shortest amount of time. Perhaps that meant he was the least affected by the power of the magic imbued into the potion? If that was even how it worked, it made sense that he was the last to get sick.

Logan sighed. He had gotten stuck on the seventh day of studying the Goddess. He had tried to study the field of flowers and meteors to force a breakthrough, but his mind was unable to comprehend anything more. He was stuck in more ways than just his comprehension of the Goddess.

Tomorrow, it would be ten days since they had been locked away. Being forced to drink the mysterious liquid that was both saving and killing them was psychological torture. Everyone grew more on edge with each passing day, making it impossible to remain civil.

Logan didn’t know if the painting would help them escape, but he did know that it was the only thing to keep him from going insane. That was until he started to feel a bit warm. He had been thinking he was immune or special in some way. Clinging to that little strand of hope was helping more than he could’ve imagined just a day ago, because when he noticed the glowing veins, he almost had a mental breakdown.

It was so bad that something snapped inside him, the stress just leaking away. If he was going to die, then so be it. Little did he know that extreme calm was precisely what he needed. As he fell asleep that night, Logan knew he didn’t have much hope of breaking through his bottleneck.

He had been stuck for three days by this point, and he didn’t even know what would happen when he did eventually comprehend the entirety of the Goddess. The fever also made him too sick to focus. That was why he simply curled up in the corner and imagined himself resting in a field of flowers.

His mind sunk deeper into his visualisations. Logan slowly forgot everything as he imagined what it was like to be the Goddess herself. She wasn’t trying to comprehend anything. She was just a girl admiring the beauty of nature, just as he was now doing.

Silently, his mindset began to shift to one of appreciation. He was no longer consumed by greed or desire, simply choosing to submerge himself in the endless mysteries of the world. He felt like he was gazing upon the beauty of the painting for the first time again. There were no hidden motives or agendas, only a pure heart wishing to see and understand more about the world around it.

Without realising what was going on, Logan broke through his bottleneck. He comprehended the mysteries within the brush strokes and underwent a mental transformation. The Goddess was no longer blurry or confusing to his eyes, becoming nothing more than a young woman experiencing the full breadth of nature.

As he fell asleep, his mind and soul began to transcend their limits.

***

The next morning, Logan opened his eyes to a row of skeletons in full plate. They stood watch in the hallway for the next hour, none of them moving as they waited for something. Logan had no idea what they were doing until someone began to scream out their lungs. Following that outburst was a flash of blinding orange light.

Everyone was awake now. They all watched in shock as a knight in full plate opened James’ door and barged in. It grabbed his flaming body and held him down, allowing the robed skeleton to make an incision in his stomach before it poured a bottle of revival potion in.

While this happened, the rest of the squad was unlocking the other cell doors. Logan didn’t pay much attention to the two hulking knights as they grabbed his arms. He couldn’t, really. Not when James was being dragged up the stairs, kicking and screaming while he burned alive.