I woke up sometime later. I found my body buried beneath a pile of rubble, some of which was pressing sharply against my torso. But I felt no pain. I was likely too numb to sense it.

Despite the lack of a light source, I could see the contours of the stones I was buried under very clearly—far too clearly, in fact.

“Holy shit!” I exclaimed after I finally remembered where I was.

My words were caught in my throat as I suddenly realized… I could speak. I rushed to get up, slamming my head into a boulder with such force that the stone cracked, but I didn’t even feel it. Still, the disbelief at the apparent sturdiness of my skull was vastly overshadowed by the fact that…

I could move.

I suspended my thrill at my miraculous recovery in favor of getting the hell out of the situation I found myself in. This wasn’t good. I was buried under likely tons of rubble, and who knew what the rest of my body even looked like?

I moved my head to take a look at myself. From what little of my upper torso I could see, I was entirely naked, and jagged stone was pressing against my bare skin.

Despite the fact that, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that my fate was sealed, I decided to let my delusions last a while longer, hoping that I still had a way out. I desperately tried to move, and—the debris weighing down on me shifted. I moved my other side, and with the sound of clattering rocks, I was able to pull my arm out into the small opening I found myself in.

A moment later, I managed to pull my second arm out as well. My heart beat wildly as I observed my limbs, shocked to discover that there wasn’t even a single bruise on them. Gulping, I observed the large stone slab located right above my head. I pressed one arm to it and then another. Then, with all the strength I could muster, I pushed.

With strength far beyond anything a human should be capable of exerting, I moved the massive slab off me, causing a loud cascade of tumbling rock as I revealed the ceiling above. A part of the cave seemed to have collapsed. I looked down at the lower half of my body, which was still buried. Taking a deep breath, I started slowly removing the fragments, deathly afraid of what I thought I would see below.

To my surprise, my body, although entirely naked, was unblemished. Once I finished digging myself out, I slowly got up. There was no pain anywhere in my body. None of my bones were broken, and not a single cut or bruise was to be found.

“What the hell is happening…?”

I took a look around me. As far as I could see, there was nothing but piles of stone in the room. I didn’t know what I expected to find, but I hoped to locate a way out. Turning to look behind me, I found a path through the solid stone, a cave that stretched for a while before turning to the right and continuing into the darkness. I had no idea whether that was an exit, but with nowhere else to go, I headed towards it.

With careful steps, I made my way across the mountain of rubble. I could feel that the stone I was standing on was cold and sharp, but neither bothered me in the slightest. It was as if my feet were made of tanned leather. Frankly, I was too distressed to think straight, but now that I was paying more attention, my body felt nothing but… comfortable.

I kept moving.

It took me relatively little time to make it over the collapsed section and onto solid ground. Once I made my way there, I took a deep breath and headed into the dark cave. Well, I felt it was dark, but to my eyes, a lack of light seemed to be no obstacle.

There were no shadows or light sources. This created a phenomenon that almost reminded me of being in a poorly shaded videogame.

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With nothing but absolute darkness by my side, I was left alone with my thoughts. After walking through the cave for a while, I suddenly stopped.

Where the hell was I? What on Earth was happening? “Am I really still alive?” I asked myself. Honestly, I didn’t know.

I had long forgotten what it was like to be able to move. But as far as I knew—and worse, as I feared—it could be that I was dead. I seemingly possessed superhuman strength, and my body felt practically no pain.

I didn’t believe that it was a hallucination. I couldn’t. Having experienced the touch of that vile essence crawling along the contours of my soul, I had no doubt that this was truly happening.

Unfortunately, my dazed mind could only conjure one explanation for this—I was a lost soul roaming through the afterlife. And, given what I’d seen so far, I doubted that I was in heaven.

Taking a deep breath, I sat on the ground and focused on my body. I felt things, but not the way I remembered that things should feel. I pressed the palm of my hand against my bare thigh. The feeling of touch was there. But my hands weren’t cold, and my thigh wasn’t warm. It was as if there was no difference in temperature between my palm and my leg.

I balled my fist and lightly slammed it into the stone beside where I was sitting. I felt the touch and sensed the impact but suffered no backlash. I kept punching the ground repeatedly, doing it harder and harder, hoping to continue until I could feel something.

When the impact of my knuckles sent cracks spreading through the ground around me, I stopped. That had caused a hint of discomfort. And scared the shit out of me.

At the very least, I had proof that I could feel things. Feel pain. That was enough for now.

I got up and continued walking. Eventually, I reached a fork. There was no indication that either of the two paths was the correct one, so I picked at random and turned right. Minutes passed. I had no way to reliably track time, so the walk felt like it took forever.

I didn’t feel hungry. I didn’t feel thirsty. I didn’t feel tired. It was as if I had no bodily needs other than breathing, and I was starting to suspect that I didn’t even need to do that.

Eventually, I heard a noise. I leaned against the cave wall, trying to conceal myself as I strained my ears. To my surprise, what had been faint whispers in the distance immediately cleared up.

I nearly jumped out of my skin as I heard the growling. It didn't sound like an animal. I suddenly caught a smell in the air. It stank of rot. Surprisingly, the stench didn’t bother me. If anything, I found it strangely… pleasant.

A feeling of terror sparked in the back of my mind, but it felt muted. That, too, didn’t bother me as much as I felt it should.

Instead, a calm, calculating coldness enveloped my mind as I started thinking.

It was possible that danger was ahead. I had to be careful.

I noticed a faint light. It gently illuminated the walls around me, making the world feel ever-so-slightly more real.

I decided to inch forward, cautiously approaching until I got a better view of what I was dealing with. The cave turned sharp right just ahead of me, and as I leaned my head over to check further ahead, I discovered another turn, this time left.

I kept going, listening carefully to ensure I wasn’t too close to the sound. The volume at which I heard the noises was as loud as if they were beside my ear, but it still sounded like I had more to go until I reached it. But it was close.

The light got brighter. The noises grew louder.

I kept inching toward the second turn, and I peeked behind the edge again—

My eyes bulged.

My sight was greeted by the picture of an open wasteland festering with creatures that I could only refer to as zombies. Thick, ghastly mist hung in the air. The soil was a dead, depressing shade of grey. Walking, rotting corpses of what appeared to be humans at first glance populated the dour clearing, but looking deeper, I saw numerous individuals with inhuman features, such as sets of four arms, pointy ears, heads like beasts, and so on.

It didn’t take long for me to look past the crowd of corpses to see something that terrified me far more than any single one of them. A giant figure in partially destroyed knight armor kneeled just a few dozen meters outside the cave, its gigantic, almost five-meter-long sword embedded into the ground.

Half its helmet was missing, revealing nothing but a dried skull with a few inches of withered flesh still clinging to it.

As I gazed into the black hole it had for an eye…

It turned its head and faced me as well.