In a room there stands a 'man'.

"Security: Privacy Absolute."

His ambitions great, his plans grand.

"Serenity: Mind Resolute."

Great glowing patterns cover ceiling and floor.

"Summoning: Fate's Great Foil."

At their convergence hovers life, brain, and core.

"Summoning: Mortal Coil."

Into living brain, a dagger is driven.

"Death and Life: Phylactery."

Into crystal core, a spirit is bidden.

"Tyranny and Strife: Slavery."

With great chants intoned, lesser magics dull.

"Property: Owner's Mark."

False flesh fades to bone, fake face fades to skull.

"Prophecy: Future's Dark."

The skeletal figure slings spell after spell.

"Tongues: Polyglottery."

A pre-planned sequence to rival heavens and hells.

"Change: Permanency."

With fierce arcane cunning, curse and crystal are wed.

"Strength: Giant's Might."

Not the first, not the last, but CRRRRRACK! makes three hundred.

(Crystal shatters in bony grasp, and new soul takes flight.)

Basic (4) dungeon core destroyed.

Select Reward.

Dreadmaster Sutalu Clac, the first and final Arch Lich, did not sneer at the paltry rewards. Nor did he indulge in his impulse to make a selection. Instead he increased interface transparency from 50% to 90%.

Once upon a time – that is to say, as recently as last year – Clac had developed the habit of accepting the reward as quickly as systemly possible just to get the screen out of his face. Core destruction notifications are annoyingly persistent.

He followed this habit unthinkingly until a certain hypothesis struck him. Then he set out to break the habit after his tests proved it true: A destroyed core does not reform in the world until its destroyer selects their reward.

One too many lost cores. That had been the motivation behind this discovery.

Some dungeons had entrenched themselves too deeply into their spawn location before he found them. Others were destroyed by delvers. The final straw had been a core claimed by enemy forces mere minutes before his arrival.

Each core is a significant investment. Each loss, a significant cost. Some failures are inevitable – attributed most often to atrocious spawn locations. But the preventability of that final straw had fueled the rising fire of frustration within him.

Entire empires would have glowed green with envy if they knew the level of control that Clac commanded over dungeon core spawning – or, as he has come to confirm, dungeon respawning. Many thinkers suspect it, but he alone has proved it. It was a necessary step on the path to controlling the process.

And yet, that level of control had not been enough. He desired more. He sought ever greater power. He wanted to grow stronger.

And thus did he squeeze another inch of advantage out of his already-ludicrous procedure. And thus he did not select a reward from the faded screen that floated before his eyes. Not yet.

Instead he cleaned his basement until it was prim, proper, and pristine. This meant discretely discarding the depleted dregs – most noticeably the now-dead human brain. Once disposal was done, he dismantled the supreme security ward he had established at the start of his sequence, leaving only the standard privacy spells in place. After a final once-over, he left his basement and strode towards his study. He'll need a worksheet, concentration, and patience to determine the rough location of his dungeon core when it respawns, then he'll need his world map and atlas collection to plan the best route to reach it.

He sat down at a desk littered with parchment, organized them with a wave of his hand, and readied himself for a session of good old mathematics. Then he checked to see how much time remained until full recovery from his earlier spellcasting. That sequence is never easy (or cheap) to cast, even for him.

Seeing that he still had plenty of time, he got caught up on a few of the papers he had stacked moments prior. He worked on them while his mana recharged, waiting without bated breath.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

______________________________

In a limbo of nothing but his own awareness, Rori couldn't move, couldn't see, couldn't smell, couldn't hear, couldn't feel. He could only think.

Hm… not as bad as I thought it'd be, to be honest.

He's been in a sensory deprivation chamber before, and he's had a few bouts of sleep paralysis in his life. Not to mention his illness. By comparison, this is practically pleasant.

The afterlife, I mean.

For a while, he burned the recent past into memory. Israel Rori Goldstein once boasted a powerful memory before illness took it from him. It's been so long since he's been able to think so clearly, and he wants perfect recall on the scene with the skeleton man. To do that, he needs to relive the memory while it's still fresh. Then wait for a while. Then relive it again. Rinse and repeat five times, and it will stick in his mind.

Between repeats, he had time to think.

So it exists after all. Huh.

Rori didn't believe in ghosts, magic, or the supernatural. By extension, he didn't believe in the afterlife. Not enough convincing evidence had always been his hang-up.

I mean, what else COULD it be?

But now he HAS evidence. The very best kind: personal experience.

Wait a minute. If I'm dead, does that make this purgatory? Or hell?

Obviously the afterlife must exist after all-

Nope! Definitely not the afterlife. Gotta be something else. There's no doubt in my mind!

Motivated purely by scientific reasoning, Rori knew better than to allow a single piece of anecdotal evidence change his mind. So he kept thinking.

Ah-HA! It's a coma dream! Can't be anything else.

He already tried his usual methods of waking up from a lucid dream and they hadn't worked. But with a coma dream, of course it wouldn't be that easy.

Wait, if it's a coma dream, then I'm in a coma. And according to the doctors, that means I'm never waking up again…

A coma dream was, in all likelihood, the right guess.

Definitely not a coma dream! No, sir-ee! Something else for sure. There's no doubt in my mind! But then what is it? And for that matter, what can I even DO right now?

Step one to changing your circumstances when you're feeling helpless is to (A) get help, (B) just start doing stuff and see how that goes, (C) try to understand what's going on, or preferably, (D) do all of the above at the same time.

HELLO? ANYONE HOME?! I'D LIKE TO GET OUT OF LIMBO, PLEASE!!

Given the circumstances, he isn't above literally trying to pray his way out of it. This could be the afterlife, after all. Higher powers could be listening to his thoughts.

But after a few failed attempts, (A) and (B) didn't look like they were going anywhere, so he decided to focus on option (C). That means it's back to the original question:

What the heck is going on?

There's a saying that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So it could be…

Aliens.

Because he's fairly certain that literal brain-in-a-jar technology is utterly beyond the capabilities of 21st century earth.

Definitely aliens. It's gotta be. Can't be anything else.

Excluding a coma-dream and the afterlife, aliens is as good a guess as any.

Or time-traveling humans from the future. Or maybe the simulation overlords in charge of my old reality have unplugged me from the matrix.

In any case, the important question is: Why? Why pluck out the consciousness of a near-comatose human and place it into some kind of limbo?

Bio-harvesting. They're going to turn my body into batteries!!

Bio-harvesting would probably mean the limbo is here to stay. That, or some kind of inescapable enslavement. Or both.

Nope! Not bio-harvesting. Definitely not bio-harvesting. They always said that was super inefficient. Yep. Gotta be something else.

In his scrambling search for a believable excuse righteous quest for the undeniable truth, the thought occurred to him that his fellow 21st century earthlings would be none the wiser if just his consciousness was plucked. His doctors, coronor, and mortician would all assume he simply succumbed to his illness.

They need my brainpower. That's it for sure!

But that still doesn't answer the question of 'Why?' Are human consciousnesses inherently valuable?

Well, yes, actually. They are. Rori firmly believes that.

Wait a minute, with 30% of internet traffic being what it is, that means they're going to use my brain to store their p-

However, the pertinent question isn't what Rori believes to be valuable. The question is what the mind-snatchers find valuable.

Nope. Definitely not my brainpower!

Super-tech beings probably don't need the raw processing power found in a human brain. Especially with how biased and error-prone it tends to be.

Entertainment for sure. They'll put me on display like a monkey in a zoo.

(Case in point.)

From the perspective of someone capable of pulling off a mind-snatch in the first place – aliens, simulator overlords, time-travelling humans, or whoever else – what value could a human consciousness have to them?

No, wait! Study! They'll put me in my 'natural habitat' to learn more about humans.

There could be any number of motivations. Entertainment. Profit. Status. Science. Some twisted psychological drive. Or maybe the motivation is, quite literally, alien to human ways of thinking.

Maybe they EAT humans. Or brains! That skeleton man DID have a brain. Was that MY brain? IS that my brain?

But one thing's almost certain.

The brain DID have a knife through it…

It probably hadn't been done for Rori's sake.

Nope, definitely not my brain. Must've been someone else's.

Rori is just having fun at this point. And/or going insane. He can hardly believe he gets to live through a REAL alien abduction mystery!

Whatever's going on, I'll be damned if I don't make the most of it!

And for the most part, he'd thought through these theories long before his illness, except the parts involving the weird scene he'd seen.

Wait a minute…

That is, until a novel possibility finally occurred to him.

What if my illness itself…

______________________________

Only once he was fully recovered did Clac increase his interface opacity and allow the reward selection screen to dominate his vision.

His creation would not appear in the world the moment he made the selection. Otherwise Clac would have seen the implication long ago. Instead, the core would reform at its own pace. It could take as few as two minutes, and he needed to be ready for that, or it could take more than four hours.

No matter how long it took, Clac would wait. Gone are the days of avoidable losses and mistakes made in haste. Here are the days of cool calculation and careful preparation, as they should have been from the start.

His atlases hung above him, ready to be referenced. A blank piece of paper sat off to the side, waiting to become a worksheet. A dungeon core is about to respawn in the world, begging to be found. And he will be among the first to find it.

Basic (4) dungeon core destroyed.

Select Reward.

Dreadmaster Sutalu Clac, the first and final Arch Lich, made his selection, dismissed the screen, and… returned to his pending papers. No sense wasting time while he waited.